


Running

by LaFilleAvecLeStylo



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Bodyguard Romance, F/M, Humor, Not Epilogue Compliant, Not Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Compliant, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:20:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 33,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23807539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaFilleAvecLeStylo/pseuds/LaFilleAvecLeStylo
Summary: He is running away from everything. She is running to find something. They run into each other. Over a decade after the war has ended, Ministry contractor Hermione Granger is charged with escorting Draco Malfoy from Lyon to London. It was never going to go smoothly.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 34
Kudos: 86





	1. Chapter 1

The rain was painting a Jackson Pollock on the train window, distorting the faces outside into strange oblongs. Hermione leaned back in her chair, exhausted. She had never been able to sleep on public transit, and the events of her childhood made it that much more difficult for her to relax anywhere unfamiliar. 

The events of her childhood. 

She had spent so many years fighting battles for which she was too young, drafted by blood into a war much older than her in a world to which she belonged only by chance. It had gone on for years after Voldemort had died. His followers reorganized, and so did Harry’s. Counter-attacks were commonplace. Revenge was foremost on everyone’s mind; revenge for loved ones, for lost opportunities, for lost hope. With every scar gained, with every new death to her name, Hermione would cling desperately to the hope that one day she could live a nice, normal, boring life. 

She watched the streets of Lyon pass by. She was on a regular, non-magical train surrounded by regular, non-magical people. They had no idea who she was or what battles she had fought. A small boy tried to run into the aisle and his mother pulled him back. A young woman stretched her arms high in the air, trying to dispel the tension of a long trip. A couple near her on the train exchanged heated words (“ _C’est qui, elle?” “Personne! Elle n’est personne, je te le jure!” “Si elle n’est personne, pourquoi avait-t-elle ta chemise!?”_ ). A man’s music was audible through his headphones, filling the space around him with a heavy cello piece. They were probably all living such nice, normal, boring lives.

The train began to cross the Saône, and Hermione picked up her rucksack. She had really thought she wanted a nice, normal, boring life. Of course, perhaps her perspective on boring was skewed. When your normal for approximately a decade was living out of a go-bag and assuming each moment was your last, antiquing in the countryside on the weekends really couldn’t cut it for excitement. 

It wasn’t as if it was actually over. There were still violent flare-ups of anti-muggle nationalism which would result in a series of arrests. Every once in a while a new charismatic lunatic would appear, trying to rally stragglers into a new battle for magical supremacy. It would take generations for the prejudices which underscored every aspect of the wizarding world to really begin to transform into something that could be recognized as healing. The war had been won, however, and Hermione was no longer caught up in its battles.

Hermione was not at all unhappy that this movement was finally gasping its dying breaths, boring though life after it may be. She had suffered losses. She had seen friends murdered in cold blood, and seen old classmates stand opposite her on the battlefield. It was their faces that haunted her most after she made the deceptively easy choice to take their lives. The hardest person to lose had been Ron, after he had blocked a Killing Curse aimed for a child. She had been too hardened by then to cry, even though they had been lovers. They weren’t in love, per se, as there is very little room for love in war, but he had comforted her. It had been something. Sometimes in her dreams she would see him as a child, wand snapped, trying to keep up with Harry. On those nights she would wake up with wet cheeks and she would have to turn on a light before falling back asleep. 

Progress had been slow. First the Ministry had been broken of its fascistic tendencies, and ridded of its most rotted branches. The teaching staff at Hogwarts and other schools had been similarly weeded. Mass round-ups of particularly violent or active Death Eaters began, temporarily overcrowding Azkaban before a similar facility could be set up elsewhere to handle the overflow. Small cells of organized bigots aside, the war was won. (Had it been a war? No war was ever officially declared. Had she been a child soldier? How many lives must you take before you aren’t a child anymore? Does any language have the right words for this?)

When it ended, whatever it was, she had shut down. Harry had done the same. No, neither wanted to write a book. No, neither wanted to be interviewed. No, neither wanted to teach anything to anyone anywhere. No, neither wanted to see anyone. 

Harry flew a lot to escape his demons, mostly under the cover of darkness. He had killed much more than she had. She read books from her childhood, from before she had ever heard of Hogwarts or had thought that magic could be anything but a plot device. 

It had been her mother, safely returned from Australia, who suggested she seek therapy. It had helped, a bit. Slowly but surely, as buildings were repaired and positions in the Ministry were filled with less abhorrhent occupants, Hermione began to be able to go outside. She was able to walk without clutching her sides in fear. She stopped shooting hexes at anybody who approached her unexpectedly. She stopped screaming in the night, mostly. She stopped waking up with blood in her mouth, having bitten at herself during her nightmares. Her scars in all their shapes and forms began to fade, leaving her with a quilt of white and pink stripes covering her torso, her arms, her legs, her back. She could look at herself in a mirror without breaking down. 

Harry finally did take a teaching position at Hogwarts, where he had happily settled into the role of Master of Defense Against the Dark Arts. Hermione had taken a meeting at the Ministry of Magic for a role in a department there, taken one look at the spot where a statue had once stood depicting Muggles being crushed by magic, and vowed never to work for a government which had so easily been swayed to fascism and genocide. 

The train pulled into the Gare de Lyon-Perrache, and Hermione joined the slow-moving line of passengers disembarking. Life after everything had been so dull. She found a job at a small bookstore where people didn’t stare at her too much, and she went to work, and went home, and bought groceries, and sometimes went out for a drink with friends, and on and on it went. Nothing happened. Nothing was ever going to happen.

She didn’t know how to explain it. She certainly didn’t want life to be how it had been, but she had assumed that without the horrors of genocide life could still be interesting in a pleasant way. She hadn’t expected to feel so suffocated by the overwhelmingly placid niceness of it all. So Hermione did what she always did when things weren’t going her way. She did something foolhardy and complicated which would solve nothing but sounded pretty good. Which led her to renting out a small, nice-enough shop tucked out of the way in a street off of a street off of Diagon Alley, and opening H. G. Investigations. 

She had loved private eye movies as a child, and she had a good idea of what to expect. She bought a trenchcoat. She bought a magnifying glass, not that she needed one, but she felt it completed the aesthetic. She would be the next Sam Spade. She would be the next Hercule Poirot. She would have a whirlwind affair with the world’s greatest jewel thief, a scintillating relationship built on fiery passion and the tension that comes from being adversaries. She would… spend a lot of time spying on spouses who, half the time, weren’t even doing anything wrong. 

The rain continued outside the train station, puddling at her feet and making her hair stick to her face. She turned up to face the sky, welcoming the refreshing water after seven hours of being confined to a train. Taxis lined up, and one driver beckoned her, but she turned toward the river and began her twenty minute walk. She needed it after her trip. 

Once in a while jobs like this would happen. The Ministry would need someone to track someone down, but the someone to be tracked wasn’t a big enough deal to send out one of their own people. These were petty criminals, harmless. She hadn’t been thrilled to be a Ministry contractor when they first approached her, but it soon became clear that these jobs were to be her only respite from a life of informing husbands that yes, their wives were seeing their best friends, and yes, that was indeed her fee. These days she practically looked forward to Ministry jobs. 

This is what brought her to Lyon. Her target hadn’t been paying taxes recently, and he required an escort to London in order to ensure he would do so. While the Ministry gave her a few days and a meagre per diem to complete this job, Hermione expected it would take only one. A round trip from London to Lyon was only fourteen hours. She turned from the Quai Tilsitt onto the Pont Bonaparte, her destination now in view. 

Now in the shadow of the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Hermione hurried to the Jardin Archéologique behind it. She quickly pulled out her wand. While magic was never encouraged on these missions due to concerns of standing out too much, this would have to be an exception. Three quick taps on a choice rock, a muttered incantation, and spread out before Hermione was a different Vieux-Lyon, one the existence of which muggles could never know. A squat wizard sold potions supplies, shouting out measurements and ingredients which Hermione couldn’t quite translate. A cozy pub had purple smoke piping out of its chimney. A quaint hotel had flowers blooming in its window sills which were singing arias from Carmen. Poorly. 

Rain still pouring down, Hermione hurried to the hotel. She felt inside her pocket for a photo, and quickly rehearsed in her head what she intended to say. Her French was rusty. 

“Bonjour, mademoiselle. Comment allez-vous?” the young man behind the desk greeted her. _Hello, miss. How are you?_ Hermione pushed a handful of soaking wet hair off of her shoulder. 

“Très bien, merci. Je cherche cet homme, avez-vous le vu?” She pulled out a picture of her quarry, which was crumpled but still easy enough to see. _Very well, thank you. I’m looking for this man, have you seen him?_

The employee smiled. _“_ Je le regret de vous informer que je ne puisse pas donner des informations sur nos clients aux inconnus. Cependent…” Here, he gestured to a lounge to the left of the desk. _I regret to inform you that I cannot give strangers information about our guests. However…_ Hermione smiled, bobbed her head in gratitude, and headed toward the dark and smoky room to which he was indicating. 

It took her all of a second to find him. His pale hair, almost white, stood out against the dark panelled wall. Hermione briefly wondered if taking this job was worth getting away from her usual cases for a few days before steeling herself, walking over, and taking a seat in the large leather armchair opposite his. 

“Hello, Malfoy.”


	2. Chapter 2

It wasn’t that Draco Malfoy necessarily believed that muggles were inferior. Really, he didn’t. He had known enough muggleborns and half-bloods at school to know that they were more or less fine. It was that he thought muggles were just different, and should be kept separate from magical people, much in the same way that mountain lions and tigers ought to be kept separate in zoos. He simply saw no reason for them to mix with wizards. Muggleborns were nature’s freaks, and he understood in his adulthood that they had to be properly trained in the use of magic, but that didn’t change the fact that they were fundamentally different. His acknowledgement that they needed to know how to wield magic didn’t mean he liked them. He felt it was only appropriate that they be made aware of the fact that they are deviations. Did that make him a bigot? So he was a bigot. Lord knows he had paid enough for it, he might as well wear the title with pride. 

Sure, he had been on the wrong side of an exhausting war, but that was hardly his fault. Was he expected to apologize for having listened to his parents as a child? They had been wonderful parents, after all. He got all the presents he could have hoped for, and regular gifts of sweets when he was at Hogwarts. Until it had been temporarily converted into a Death Eater base, his house at Christmastime was Dickensian in its quaintness. Well, as quaint as a large manor could be. The wizarding world may have celebrated when each of his parents died, but he certainly hadn’t. To add insult to injury, he was then expected to pay exorbitant taxes to help rebuild society in the aftermath. Reparations, they had called it. The biggest joke of all was an endowment for a chair in Muggle Studies at Hogwarts which was in his name. That one had been his solicitor’s suggestion. 

Still, there was about as much sympathy for Death Eaters as there is rest for the wicked, and he was both. The taxes grew, his reputation suffered, and his bank account began to empty. He even tried looking for honest-to-goodness employment, but nobody wanted to take a chance on a Death Eater. After all, somebody taking a chance on someone who disliked muggles was essentially what had caused the entire mess. As for finding a date, well. Even people whom he knew agreed with him wanted to distance themselves from the tarnish of his reputation. Pansy Parkinson had started dating a muggleborn, for God’s sake. These people with whom he had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in battle had all run off, tails between their legs, desperate to do whatever it would take to salvage their reputations. 

Pansy Parkinson and a muggleborn. It made him laugh. 

The final straw had been when he, having just been rejected from the third job that week and it was only Monday afternoon, passed by a mother and her small child in the street. The mother immediately grabbed her son and shied away from Draco, as most people tended to. The child had been unprepared for his mother’s sudden movement and stumbled. 

“Ow, mummy! Why did you push me?”

“Hush, darling. That’s Draco Malfoy.”

“Who?”

Draco’s blood had boiled. He had been bleeding galleons for how many years now, paying for the refurbishment of a society in which he was not even welcome, and for what? For people who not only didn’t appreciate it, but didn’t know who he was? If he had been forgotten, why couldn’t his sins? 

That had been it. He was done. He had no boss to inform, very few friends to keep apprised. He simply packed up his things, emptied what remained of his vaults at Gringotts, and left London. They couldn’t steal any more of his money if they couldn’t find him.

Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hanover, Berlin. Draco began travelling to the places to which his mind had turned during the worst moments of the war. These losses had started small. His childhood dog had to be killed when they no longer had the finances to feed him, all their resources being directed toward the war effort. His grandmother had not been forthcoming about the source of that evening’s meat. Then, later, seeing his mother’s face frozen in death on their lawn, not ten paces from where she had first taught him to fly. Watching his best friend bleed out. Seeing his father commit suicide just as he was captured. In retrospect, it was almost funny how much he had cried about the dog. 

Pague, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna. It was scary how things develop, really. You pick up a few attitudes as a child, push around a few kids at school, and suddenly you’re on a side you never actually recall choosing in a war you thought ended before you were born. Since when did teasing some students for their parentage translate to wanting all of them dead? Neutrality was never an option after people started dying, though. If he had stayed in the middle of it all, he would have been killed. Either his parents and their colleagues would have killed him for defecting, or their opposition would have killed him for his perceived allegiance to Voldemort. There was no winning in a position like that, and seeing as he was very conveniently already on a side without having really meant to be, that was that. He was at war. 

Zagreb, Sarajevo, Venice, Rome. Not understanding the point of the war didn’t interfere with his participation in it. Once he was formally recruited into the ranks of the Death Eaters which he had previously known as his parents’ friends and colleagues, he approached his assignments with gusto, to varying degrees of success. There was that attempt to murder Albus Dumbledore, for example. When he recalled this, he had to grin. It had been so difficult for him to commit that particular murder. If only he could have told his young self what he later learned, that it only became easier with practice. By the time the war was winding down, he could take a life without much thought at all.

Sardinia, Algiers, Barcelona, Marseille. By the time the arrests were happening, he was twenty. He spent only seven years in Azkaban, having been recruited to the cause when he was still underage and thus considered less criminally responsible than he may otherwise have been. Besides, he was a footsoldier. There were true villains to pursue, and even though the Ministry was able to access his bank account during his incarceration, he was more useful to them outside of prison than in it. How else could he get all the paperwork in order to create endowments to institutions to which he felt he owed nothing in support of causes, chairs, and research about which he did not care? Cell bars could only hinder his investment in wizarding society. He was thirty-two when he finally left London. Good riddance. 

Lyon.

Draco had visited Lyon once as a child. He recalled being given sweets by a kindly old witch, and his nanny gently admonishing him in her native French for not thanking her. ( _ “Draco! Qu’est-ce qu’on dit quand quelqu'une nous donne un bonbon?” _ ) He would have been seven then, or thereabouts. He had gone looking for that witch when he arrived in Lyon this time only to learn that she had died in the war. Apparently she had married a muggle and paid the ultimate price, and their daughter now ran the shop. When she had asked him how he knew her mother, he told her that her mother had been kind to him once as a child. Happy to hear of her mother’s kindness, the young woman gave Draco a free bag of sweets. The same kind her mother had given him so many years ago. As he hurried away, he wondered what she would have said to him had she known the role he’d played in the war. He doubted he would be making off with free sweets. 

It was a complicated life. He swanned around Europe, visiting remarkable cities and historic sites, never once being truly honest about who he was or what he was doing there. How do you explain to someone that you took multiple lives but didn’t really mean it? He had tried it once in a pub in Barcelona and it had not gone over well. That hex had him laid up for more than a few days waiting for the hives to go down, and the mediwitches in Barcelona were less than sympathetic to him once they heard why he had been hexed. “¡Dejas que esto suceda!” the stranger in the bar had shouted at him.  _ You let this happen _ . 

He supposed he had. He hadn’t meant to. It was all so inconvenient. He should be at home in his manor outside London, running the same successful mining enterprise his family had been running for generations. They supplied cores for wands, and until things had truly gone to hell they had been on the brink of a breakthrough: a new core material made from a certain mineral. Research had had to be halted. There had been more pressing matters which required his father’s attention. 

The company had been one of the first things to go when the Ministry swooped in after the war. He had once resented the pressure to take up his father’s mantle once he retired. Now he would give anything to be sitting in that office which he had so often visited as a child, trying to organize a production deal with one of the United Kingdom’s many wandmaking establishments. It had once seemed so boring. Good Lord, could he do with some boredom. 

The rain pummelled against the window panes beside him. He was in the lounge of the hotel where he was staying; a small, upscale establishment in Vieux-Lyon. He raised his firewhisky sour to his lips, but stopped short of taking a drink. The back of his neck prickled as his instincts, honed by years of war, kicked into gear. Somebody was approaching him. He slowly maneuvered his wand out of his pocket. They walked quickly and quietly. They were used to avoiding detection. He flexed his hand around his wand, the smooth wood comforting in his grasp. 

Before he could hurl the curse he had been preparing, the chair opposite his was occupied. 

“Hello, Malfoy.”

Draco tensed. He hadn’t seen Hermione Granger in years. She was still on the short side, and her soaking wet hair which clumped unattractively around her shoulders appeared to be just as unruly as it had always famously been. The lines around her eyes and mouth were deeper and more pronounced than might be normal for a thirty-two year old, but of course, not all thirty-two year olds were front-line veterans in one of the most prolific and violent wars in the history of magic. A thin scar curved from the bridge of her nose, under her left eye, and to her ear. He had been there when she received that. His godfather had done it. She killed him in response. Draco didn’t really blame her.

“Hello, Granger.”


	3. Chapter 3

What had she expected? Well, not this, certainly. The wizard before her was crumpled into his chair like a used paper cup. He had deep wrinkles which matched hers, and the palm of his left hand bore evidence of a deep red scar which disappeared below his cuff. His attempt to surreptitiously grab his wand had been so obvious it had almost made her laugh. As she sat across from him his eyes darted to the exit, the picture of a caged animal evaluating his options. This was not the haughty boy she had known as a child, nor the arrogant one she had seen from time to time on the battlefield. Hermione had never seen Draco Malfoy look so tired and pathetic.

“What brings you to Lyon?” she asked him, leaning back in the chair and rolling her own wand between her fingers. He watched the fluid motion warily.

“The weather.”

“If you had wanted rain, you should’ve stayed in London. Famously rainy city.”

“The weather here is free.”

Hermione smirked. “Yes, about that. I’m here to escort you back to London. You’ve had your fun. It’s time to get back to paying your reparations.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “Last I checked, all the buildings that were once destroyed are now standing, plus some. What repairs are left?”

“It isn’t my job to decide how to spend your inheritance, Malfoy. I’m just here to bring you home.” A waiter approached them, looking somewhat surprised to see her there. Perhaps Draco Malfoy didn’t often have company. “De l’eau, s’il vous plaît,” Hermione instructed him. _Water, please_. 

“Should’ve known you’d order a boring drink,” Malfoy sneered. It was perhaps the weakest insult he had ever thrown her way. He must be out of sorts, Hermione decided. “Since when do you work for the Ministry, anyway? Did that pathetic excuse for a detective agency finally fold?”

Hermione glared at him, but proffered no answer. It was all the encouragement Draco needed.

“Really, Granger, a private investigator? What were you thinking? That you could keep doing good in the world by taking sneaky photographs of men with their receptionists? No wonder it collapsed.” He took a deep drink from his glass. “Should’ve known you’d fail. Too high and mighty for your own good by half. It was about time you suffered.”

At this, Hermione gritted her teeth just the slightest amount. Draco smirked at her again, enjoying her anger. “In fact, my agency is doing just fine,” she informed him. “I am here on behalf of the Ministry but in my capacity as an investigator.”

Draco’s face broke out in a wide smile which might have passed for friendly had his eyes not been so cruel. “Oh, I see. You’re a bounty hunter, then. How charming for you. Your parents must be proud.”

Hermione folded her arms just as the waiter brought over her water. She should have turned down this job. “I’d ask after your parents, Malfoy, but of course…”

Draco’s eyes flashed in anger, but sunken as they were the effect was limited. Hermione felt she had earned the right to be a bit cruel to Draco Malfoy. Call it an homage to Ron, she decided. It had been Draco’s aunt who had killed him. He wouldn’t mind Draco suffering a bit. Ron had never been averse to taking the low road. 

The interruption happened just as Draco opened his mouth in retort. The window next to them was blown in, and hexes began to bounce off of the marbled mirrors behind the bar. Hermione’s vision went just a bit blurry around the edges and then she was back on the battlefield, sprinting out of the way of a curse thrown her way by a hooded figure. She could hear screams in the distance, and knew they couldn’t be real. This would happen, her therapist had told her. Certain sounds or scents could put her right back there, praying to a god she was no longer sure existed to save her and her loved ones, to just spare them. Her therapist had called it a trigger. 

She was pulled back to the present by Draco roughly pushing past her and seeking shelter behind the bar. She followed suit, hot on his heels and throwing deflecting charms behind them. The waiter looked a bit green, but gave them a terrified nod in greeting as they joined him in crouching out of the line of fire. 

The hexes stopped for a brief period, and Hermione could hear two people climbing through the window. Their reflections in the mirrors were distorted, but clear enough to give her an idea of where the intruders were. Draco was leaning against the bar, breathing heavily. He would be loud enough to tip them off to his exact location if he wasn’t careful. In the mirror, she could just make out the shorter of the two men approaching the bar as the taller raised his wand. She closed her eyes for just a second, breathed out to steady her nerves and her hand, and jumped up. She had trained for worse. 

Hermione slashed the air with her wand and the men were unconscious and bound in the middle of the room, their wands a safe distance away. One of them was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but she couldn’t be sure that that was her fault. “C’est sur,” she told the waiter. _It’s safe_. He stood and bolted, taking a second to retch into a plant before leaving them alone with their captive intruders. Draco, for his part, poured himself a large firewhisky and took a healthy swig. 

“Isn’t it funny what people find scary or sickening?” he asked her. “I mean, after the sorts of things we’ve seen. Vomiting because of a break-in.” He laughed as if that was actually funny.

“Your instincts are terrible,” Hermione told him, slowly approaching the two men. “Were you even watching them in the mirror?”

“My instincts are fine,” he shot back. “I simply wasn’t prepared for an attack.”

“Or in other words, your instincts are terrible. Did they even train you when you joined up, or were you expendable from the start?” She bent down to inspect the head wound on the one man, whispering an incantation which healed it. “Not a serious wound. He won’t need to see a doctor or anything.”

“Since when are you an expert mediwitch?” Draco laughed without mirth. 

“I’m a better mediwitch than you are a soldier, apparently,” Hermione responded. 

To this Draco had no response. He hadn’t been a particularly brilliant soldier, it was true. Instead of responding he took another deep gulp of his firewhisky. “I’m assuming this drink will be comped,” he said. 

Hermione barked a genuine laugh, which surprised him. He hadn’t meant to be funny. He had never had a talent for comedy. 

It was at this point that the gendarmes bustled into the room, and Hermione took over the task of informing them of what had happened and establishing her and Draco’s identities. No, she had no idea who the men were. Yes, she was there on official Ministry of Magic business to escort Draco back to England. No, he had not committed any acts which might result in prison time here in France. Yes, they would be out of the country as soon as possible. Yes, their papers were in order. 

She spoke French with the halting coherence of someone who once spoke it quite well but had forgotten a good deal of it. Draco could have helped her, of course, but why bother? She would be insufferable about it anyway, and although he spoke flawlessly accented French and would definitely be able to hurry along this conversation, why rush his return to a country which existed only to render him impoverished through harsh punitive taxes? He sipped his firewhisky in silence. 

“Sir, c’est Jean-Pierre LeComte.” _Sir, this is Jean-Pierre LeComte_.

Draco sputtered into his glass. That caught his attention. Hermione quirked an eyebrow at him. The young constable was peering closely at the face of one of the captive intruders, comparing it to a small photo in his hand. 

“T’es certain?” his captain asked. _You’re sure?_

“Complètement. Faut-il avertir Paris? Qu’avons nous à faire?” _Completely. Should we tell Paris? What should we do?_

The urgency of their conversation had piqued Hermione’s interest, and with a small amount of difficulty she was made to understand the situation. One of these men was Jean-Pierre LeComte, a well-known Parisian criminal who was part of a large international syndicate the activities of which ranged from the illegal trade of rare magical creatures to the blackmail and exploitation of powerful members of wizarding governments. 

Clearly thrilled with their find and bored of Hermione and Draco, the officers soon wrapped up their investigation. Why LeComte and his companion had broken into this hotel they had no idea, but as the clientele there tended to be highbrow they assumed it was to threaten or harass one of them. With LeComte and his accomplice having been bundled up and sent back to their headquarters, the two policemen left in significantly higher spirits than they arrived. Hermione could only imagine how good it would look for them to have captured this apparently dangerous criminal.

“Allons-y, Roland!” the captain said with a laugh. “On mérite quelque chose à boire!” _Let’s go, Roland. We deserve something to drink._

Hermione watched their retreating figures while Draco refilled his glass and pulled another off the shelf. 

“They aren’t the only ones who deserve a drink, Granger,” he told her. “What’ll it be?”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “I’m working, Malfoy. Water only.”

“Oh please, surely being attacked by dangerous wizards is a good enough reason to drink on the job.” He poured her a firewhisky and placed it in front of her. 

“I don’t make a habit of drinking with Death Eaters,” she told him, pushing the glass back toward him. 

“Generally a policy I would support, not least because you seem like a terrible person with whom to get drunk,” Draco countered. “I normally don’t drink with people who murdered my godfather, either.” Hermione grimaced. “However, having narrowly avoided capture just now, I think we’ve earned the right to be a little bit flexible with regard to drinking companions.”

Hermione cocked her head at him and narrowed her eyes. “So who is Jean-Pierre LeComte?” 

“I know as much as you do. French criminal.” Draco swirled his drink. 

She shook her head. “Try again. You recognized his name as soon as that constable identified him.”

Draco froze for just a second before schooling his face into polite confusion. “Can’t say I did.”

“What makes you think we avoided capture, Malfoy?”

“Come again?”

“What makes you think this invasion had anything to do with either of us?”

“I don’t think I said capture.” Draco coughed and shook his head. “I think I said we could’ve been hurt. Which we could have, by the way. Now, cheers! Drink up.” 

Hermione took a step toward him, her eyes steely. Her face betrayed absolutely no emotion. He had seen her don a similar expression in battle once upon a time. Meanwhile, he was trying desperately to feign ignorance and innocence, two things of which he had never been accused and for which he had never passed. 

“Malfoy, you aren’t a good actor. Who is LeComte to you? How do you know him?”

“It’s… possible,” Draco began, staring into his drink, “that he was here because I owe a friend of his a bit of money.”

“A bit of money?” Hermione asked. Draco shrugged. “How much is a bit of money, Malfoy?”

“Like a few hundred…” Hermione sighed. “Thousand…” Hermione groaned in frustration. “Galleons.”

“So a few thousand galleons?” Hermione was working out in her head how to arrange for the Ministry to quietly pay that off so she wouldn’t have any more unexpected visitors while transiting Draco back to London.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Draco assured her. “Not a few thousand. A few hundred thousand.” 

Well, the Ministry wouldn’t be paying for that.


	4. Chapter 4

The Ministry’s response to Hermione’s urgent owl had been disappointing but expected. They would not be paying off Malfoy’s debts, nor would they be providing any extra support to ensure her and Malfoy’s safe transit to England. She was encouraged to take as long as necessary to ensure his arrival at the Ministry of Magic in London, at her usual rate and with the standard per diem. 

Hermione tossed the parchment aside and ran a hand through her damp hair. It had stopped raining hours ago, but her thick curls were always slow to dry. 

“What’s the verdict?” Draco asked from his chair. He was settled, one ankle crossed across the opposite knee, in the corner of the small room she had booked in the pub across the way from the hotel. 

“Well, it looks like you’re my problem and mine alone,” Hermione said, sitting down on the lumpy bed. “What the hell have you got me into?” The room was small but clean and serviceable. It would do fine as a place to organize themselves before heading home. They had collected Draco’s effects from the hotel before leaving, and his bags were piled in the corner with Hermione’s rucksack.

“You could head back without me. Just say you lost track of me and I got away. This doesn’t have to involve you.” 

Hermione shook her head. “No, I was sent here to do a job, and I’m going to do it. It would help if you told me what happened back there, though.” Draco chewed his lip and narrowed his eyes. “The whole story, Malfoy. No editing.”

He sighed. “It isn’t a huge deal. Or rather, it shouldn’t be. I lost a poker game in Sarajevo.”

“One poker game?”

“Maybe more than one. In any case, I lost, and I couldn’t pay what I owed.”

Hermione scowled at him. “You really expect me to believe that two dangerous criminals tracked you down over a poker debt?”

“Well, I wanted to do right by the person to whom I owed the money, so I set out to acquire the requisite funds.” 

Hermione snorted. “And that’s an evasive way of saying you did what, exactly?”

“Well, the evening prior to the games I had seen a well-heeled gentleman showing off a necklace he had purchased for his wife.”

“A necklace?”

“A very fancy necklace.” 

“To whom did this necklace belong?”

Draco pursed his lips. “Have you heard of Giacomo Ridolfino?” 

Hermione inhaled sharply. “Malfoy, you didn’t.” Ridolfino was a very powerful criminal based in Sicily with ties to the wizarding mafia. They were an exceptionally well-organized criminal enterprise, though Hermione found their lack of explicit anti-muggle attitudes refreshing for a criminal organization. 

Draco nodded. “I did. I stole a million galleon necklace from Giacomo Ridolfino.” Hermione sighed. “And as I was stealing it, his cat escaped and was hit by a car.” Hermione groaned and put her head in her hands. 

“So LeComte worked for Ridolfino?” 

“Well, no. LeComte works for the gentleman to whom I owe money from the poker game.”

“Haven’t you paid him off? With the necklace?”

Draco shook his head. 

“Where’s the necklace?” Draco shrugged. Hermione’s eyes glinted dangerously. “Malfoy, what happened to the necklace?”

“It was stolen in Algiers. I have no idea who has it.” 

Hermione rubbed her temples. “To whom did you lose the poker game, Draco?”

“I don’t know his name, exactly.”

There was a sudden knock on the door, and both Hermione and Draco leapt to their feet, wands drawn. “Quelque chose à manger?” a voice asked them through the door.  _ Anything to eat? _ The innkeeper. Hermione was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that she hadn’t eaten since she left London at seven that morning, and that it was now seven in the evening. She glanced at Draco, pocketed her wand, and opened the door. 

A burly witch barrelled through the door, wand drawn, heading straight for Draco. Hermione grasped her wand, but it had become caught on the hem of her shirt. She couldn’t get it out. The woman was tall and muscled. She wore a large necklace and billowing robes of burgundy. Draco let out a yelp as the witch began to twirl her wand. Hermione yanked in vain at her wand, still stuck in her jeans. 

The witch had now knocked Draco unconscious, and was turning toward Hermione when Hermione spotted a massive vase not far from her reach. As the witch cast a hex her way, Hermione dashed to the side and grabbed the vase, just missing the malicious spell. Vase in hand she bolted toward the witch, unable to avoid a painful hex to the arm. With an unceremonious  _ thump _ she smashed the vase down onto the witch’s head, shattering it into innumerable pieces and knocking the witch out cold. Breathing heavily, Hermione untangled her wand from her shirt. 

She floated Draco to the bed and conjured ropes which bound the witch tightly. After quickly repairing the vase and returning it to its corner, she turned her attention to her own arm, which had turned a nasty shade of green and was tingling very unpleasantly. She screwed up her face and cast a counter-hex, which was in itself just as painful as the original hex had been. Still, at least it returned her arm to its normal colour. She stretched it out, wincing as a bolt of pain shot down to her elbow. She then called down to the pub below and ordered a platter of bread and cheeses. She was starving. 

When Draco came to, his head was throbbing and he was in an unfamiliar room. It was small, with bare white walls and dark wooden furniture. From the corner of the room, Hermione Granger was observing him, eating a piece of cheese. 

“Morning, Granger,” Draco nodded, groaning as he clutched his head and closed his eyes. 

“Evening, actually,” she informed him lightly. “I could fix that, but I wanted to get your permission before healing you.”

Draco opened one eye to squint at her and pushed himself up before collapsing back on the pillows again. “Go for it,” he groaned. “Kill me if you want.” It was excruciating. 

She snorted. “That sounds lovely, but no.” She wiggled her wand and he felt a chill swoop through his body which was quickly followed by sweet relief. 

“What the hell happened?” he asked. He hadn’t had that much to drink, after all. Hermione gestured to the opposite corner of the room, where a woman was bound and suspended in the air, deep in a magic-induced sleep. “Oh right,” he said. “Her.”

“Yes, her,” Hermione responded. “Who is she?”

“Well, I can’t say for certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she worked for either Ridolfino or Le Bib.” 

“Le Bib?” 

“Yeah, the guy to whom I lost the poker game. I don’t know his real name. Everyone just calls him Le Bib.”

Hermione had never heard of him. “What does it mean?”

“Le bibliothécaire,” Draco elaborated.

“The librarian?” 

“Yep. He founded his crime syndicate as a young man in the back room of a bookshop where he worked. His first crimes are said to have been deals in stolen rare books.”

Hermione smiled wryly. “Sounds like my kind of criminal.”

“Yeah, well, maybe once upon a time when he just dealt in books. Business has since expanded.”

Hermione nodded, and then her eyes widened. “So you owe hundreds of thousands of galleons to this Le Bib, and one million to Ridolfino? Are they both liable to send people after you?”

Draco nodded. “That about sums it up.”

“Is there anybody else searching for you about whom I should be made aware?”

“Only the government.”

Hermione snorted in laughter and slumped in her chair. “Oh, excellent. Lucky me. Of all the jobs I could be doing right now...” Draco shrugged and stared at the remaining cheese and bread. “Go for it,” she told him. “I’m done.”

As Draco scarfed down her leftovers, Hermione started pawing through his belongings. “Oi, get out of there!” he shouted, scrambling to his feet. 

“You can’t bring this all with us,” she said. “We’re on the run from two criminal organizations. You can bring one bag at most.” He scowled, hating that she was right. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t lived out of a single bag before. He had just hoped those days were permanently behind him. “Well?” she prompted. He sighed and emptied a bag onto the bed before filling it with only the necessities. 

“So what’s the plan?” he asked, roughly shoving some robes into his bag.

“Don’t bring those,” she said suddenly.

“Want me naked, Granger? I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“We’re on the run from wizards. They’ll be able to track magic use. We’re sticking to muggle spaces from here on out, and you will stick out like a sore thumb in those robes.”

For the first time since she had shown up, Draco looked at what she was wearing. Some sort of trousers and a shirt. “So you’re saying, what? That I have to dress like you?”

“Roughly, yes.”

“But you dress atrociously.”

“Look, I’m promising to get you home safe, not that you’ll be winning any awards for fashion in the process.” 

Draco clucked his tongue and weighed his options. He had apparently reached a point where somebody was going to catch him. They would either be dangerous criminals who intended to take him back to even more dangerous criminals, who would certainly torture him while awaiting a ransom which he knew nobody back in England would be able to pay. Or he could go with Granger, who would take him back to London. It was a move which would leave him destitute but at least alive. Or rather, he hoped it would leave him alive. 

“Fine,” he said at long last. “You may escort me to London.”

“Oh, yippee,” she shot back. “Now grab your bag. We’re going shopping.”


	5. Chapter 5

They dropped the remainder of his possessions in a dumpster behind the pub, and Hermione obliviated the unknown witch before depositing her on a bench in a park. She winced as the woman’s jewelry scratched her injured arm.

“Alright there, Granger?” Draco asked. 

“It’s nothing. Come on.” She led him to the square where the wizarding community of Lyon abutted the muggle community and through the concealed doorway. When they found themselves in the Jardin Archéologique, the sky was darkening. “Let’s go.”

Hermione pulled out a device which Draco did not recognize and jabbed at it roughly. Then, checking it frequently, she led him through the streets of Lyon to a dilapidated shop. 

“What’s this, then?”

“A charity shop. You need a wardrobe.”

Draco almost gagged. Charity? Did that mean she meant for him to wear clothing which had been previously worn by a muggle?

Apparently, it did. Hermione nearly sprinted through the store as Draco trailed behind her. She snatched things up with no apparent regard for sizing or style, and only ten minutes later Draco had a brand new wardrobe. Hermione deposited her haul (jeans, two t-shirts, two pairs of pants, some socks, a cardigan, and a belt) at the till and pulled out some money Draco didn’t recognize. He supposed it was of the muggle variety. The cashier, a teenaged muggle with thick eyeliner, gave Draco’s robes a once-over but said nothing. Hermione silently thanked God for French indifference. 

Hermione then manhandled Draco into a changing room and threw a small pile of clothing after him. “You can keep your shoes, but put those on.” 

When he emerged from the changing room and saw his reflection, Draco was just about ready to turn himself over to Le Bib’s people. “You cannot be serious.” Hermione only rolled her eyes and marched away, leaving him to gather up his robes and chase her. “Hey, wait up! This shirt is way too big for me!”

“You’re on the run. You don’t have the luxury of fashion.” She couldn’t count how many times she had worn ill-fitting clothing from a charity shop during the twilight of the war. Draco would live. Hermione grabbed his robes from him and shoved them into a bin on the street.

Draco scowled. “Fine. Now what?” It was getting dark and chilly, and Hermione was shivering lightly. She pulled out that device again and jabbed at it some more. 

“This way.”

“Can you ever tell me where we’re going, or am I just to obediently follow you forever more?”

“We’re going to an inn. It has been a long day.” Well, he couldn’t argue with that. 

“Can we stop and grab a bottle of wine on the way?”

Hermione scowled at him, glanced at her device, and stalked off. So that was a no, then. 

They walked in silence for about an hour before Hermione finally stopped in front of a truly dingy looking establishment. The small pub had no visible name, and Draco was so tired he had no concept of where he was. He followed her inside in silence and stayed mute as she arranged with the bartender to rent a room for the night. 

“Du vin?” the bartender asked her gruffly.  _ Wine? _ Hermione rubbed her arm before sighing in despair and exhaustion. She looked back at her ward, raised her eyes to the ceiling, and nodded. 

  
“Fuck it,” she mumbled. “Oui, merci.”  _ Yes, thank you _ . 

Draco gaped at her in delight. “Moi aussi, s’il vous plaît, monsieur. Et peut-être quelque chose à manger pour nous deux?”  _ Me too, please, sir. And perhaps something to eat for us both? _ The bartender nodded and turned his back on the pair.

Hermione turned on Draco, furious. “You speak French? And you didn’t mention this until now?”

“Yes, well, I hadn’t quite decided whether or not I wanted to help you get me back to London. It turns out it’s in my best interest that you succeed.”

Hermione shook her head and sank onto a barstool. “This is a nightmare.”

Draco perched next to her. “Come on now, what are you missing back home? Some guy who wants you to track down an ex-girlfriend? Investigating insurance claims?” Hermione smirked. He wasn’t too far off. “At least this is interesting.”

“This is slightly more interesting than I had bargained for,” she responded, nodding to the bartender as he placed a glass of wine and a bowl of stew in front of her. “There has to be a happy medium between complete tedium and almost dying.”

Draco nodded. “You’d think. So that’s why you’re playing out this gumshoe fantasy, huh, Granger? Got bored without a war to fight?”

“Something like that.” 

They ate in silence, Hermione periodically glancing at the door and scanning the faces of the other patrons of the bar. Nobody ever seemed to look their way. 

After they had finished and settled their tab, Hermione led Draco to the room she had let for the night. 

“Problem, Granger,” Draco said, stopping in the doorway. Hermione shoved him through the door and followed him as he stumbled. “Oi!”

  
“What’s the problem, Malfoy?”

“One bed.” One small bed, at that. He knew he had joked about her wanting him naked earlier, but he hadn’t actually meant it. 

Hermione snorted. “All yours, Malfoy. I’m not here to steal your virtue.”

“And where do you plan to sleep?”

“I don’t.” She settled into the lone chair in the room, an uncomfortable wooden contraption. “I’ve got a ward to supervise.”

“You can’t mean that. You have to sleep.” Hermione shook her head. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Didn’t realize you cared, Malfoy.”

Draco scoffed and shook his head, turning away from her and digging into his bag. “Granger, did you think to get me any nightclothes?”

“Pants, Malfoy. You’re going to sleep in your pants.”

He looked scandalized. “What, all vulnerable like that? No way!”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t be in this position if you hadn’t pissed off some seriously violent people. Blame yourself.” True, but he didn’t care to admit it. 

Hermione watched dispassionately as Draco stepped out of his muggle clothing and crawled into the bed. His back was a tapestry of scars not unlike her own. The angry red scar on his palm which she had noticed earlier wound up his arm, dissecting his Dark Mark, and to his shoulder, where it puckered. The Dark Mark in question looked sickly and faded, a magical tattoo which was no longer sustained by the magic which had created it. “So you’re really going to watch me sleep, then?” he asked her. She nodded. “Weird,” he muttered, blowing out the candle next to his bed. 

It was weird, but not in the way Draco thought. It wasn’t weird because she was watching Draco Malfoy sleep. Watching the people the Ministry sent her to fetch was standard procedure. After all, she couldn’t trust them not to bolt if she so much as blinked. The weird part was that Hermione actually liked sleeplessness. It reminded her of being on the run with Harry and the Order of the Phoenix, of having a sense of purpose greater than her sense of self. Back then she had stayed awake for days at a time, always on high alert, always ready to bolt. Once she stayed awake for twelve days straight. It shouldn’t have been medically possible. The more tired she got as she held watch during these Ministry jobs the closer she came to feeling that same rush as she did during those sleepless stints as a teenager. 

Of course, she couldn’t go as long without sleep now as she once could. On a good job she could go four days without sleep, and then she would need a whole week to recover. Still, she cherished these nights when she was alone with her thoughts and in total control of her situation. She took pleasure in the eerie stillness of the witching hour and she found a sort of fearlessness in the threat that anything could happen at any time. She was sure her therapist would have something to say about that. 

Draco Malfoy didn’t sneer in his sleep. It made him look smaller. The circles under his eyes lended him the same gauntness she would expect of someone who didn’t know when to expect their next meal. The candle next to Hermione flickered, its dim glow catching a pale scar on his face which she hadn’t noticed before. It extended from his chin down his throat, straddling the space between his windpipe and his jugular. He had been lucky. So had she. She ran her finger along the scar which ran below her eye, which had almost cost her her vision. 

In retrospect, killing a man for slicing her face was an overreaction. In a situation like that, though, there really wasn’t time for rationality or mercy. Hermione grimaced as her arm gave a twinge. She couldn’t heal like she once could. Her body was finally rebelling against years of abuse, trying to slow her down. She couldn’t slow down now, though. Slowing down felt like giving up on whatever it is she had been after ever since the war had ended. 

Draco wasn’t a particularly sound sleeper, but she supposed few veterans were. He tossed every few minutes, muttering as he went. At around two in the morning he started whimpering as if in pain, and Hermione wondered if she should wake him. Unwise to wake a trained warrior unexpectedly, she decided. He settled, and she filled the kettle which the pub had supplied with water and switched it on. She would need tea to make it through the night. The pub’s selection was pitiful but caffeinated, and that was all she needed. 

At four in the morning Draco began to shake and to whimper with renewed intensity. He was agitated, mumbling a string of barely coherent words which sounded like a combination of names and curses. “No,” he gasped. “Father, no!” He let out a low wail, like an animal in pain. “Potter!” He shouted Harry’s name like a bitter curse.

Hermione knew that Harry had been there when Draco’s father committed suicide. She couldn’t imagine having a dream in which Harry was the villain, but then again, she had never fought against him. She knew he could be ruthless when he had to be. She cocked her head to the side and watched as Draco writhed in agony on the bed, digging his nails into his own arm until she could see blood. 

“Mother,” he croaked.

Enough was enough, Hermione decided. She had to wake him up. She grabbed her wand and approached his bed, keeping her wand aloft lest he attack her. But then, quite suddenly, Draco stilled. Hermione stopped in her tracks, her wary eyes glued to his face. When nothing happened she returned to her chair. There she remained, her eyes glued to Draco’s peaceful sleeping form, until the dawn. 


	6. Chapter 6

Come seven in the morning, Hermione was dressed and ready to go. She had quickly brushed her teeth and used a wet towel to quickly wash herself. They could grab breakfast en route. 

“Rise and shine,” she announced, drawing open the curtains. Draco groaned and covered his eyes with his hand. 

“Fuck off, Granger.”

“Charming,” she smirked. “Now get up.” She threw his bag at him, and he grunted as it collided with his stomach. 

“Alright, alright, I’m getting up.” Draco rolled out of bed, falling on the floor as his feet tangled in the sheets. Hermione tapped her foot impatiently as he pulled a new t-shirt and pants out of his bag. 

“How’d you sleep?” she asked him. 

“Fine.”

Hermione stared pointedly at the gashes on his arm from his nails, and he turned away. “Door open,” she barked at him as he headed to the washroom. 

Draco gaped at her. “What, fancy a peek?”

“I won’t have you escaping.”

“Granger, you’re the only person after me right now who doesn’t want me dead. I’m not going anywhere.”

Hermione shrugged, but blocked him from slamming the door with her foot. 

“Have it your way,” Draco said. “Pervert.”

Hermione rolled her eyes, never once glancing into the washroom as Draco got ready. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, willing herself to wakefulness. 

“Should’ve slept,” Draco said, leaning against the doorframe of the washroom. “I’m not a flight risk. You’re my best chance of surviving to next week.” She couldn’t explain it to him. She could barely explain it to herself. She liked being exhausted. She never felt as alive as she did when she was a second from passing out. 

“Let’s go,” she said, turning on her heel without a backward glance. Draco grabbed his bag and followed suit, rolling his eyes at her dramatics. 

“Mind telling me where we’re going?” he asked as they reached the street. It didn’t look much better in the daytime than it had in the dark. 

“London, eventually,” she told him. It was just a matter of getting there. 

“Eventually?”

“Well, we’ll be taking muggle transportation there—”

“We what now?”

“—as a protective measure, knowing that whomever is looking for you will be looking in wizarding communities.”

Draco kicked the sidewalk. Stupid poker game. He had had a flush, how could he have lost?

Le Bib had had a royal flush, that’s how. 

Hermione was already walking away, and Draco bolted to catch up with her. “Could you stop doing that?”

“Stop doing what?”

“Walking off without me. You’re supposed to be keeping me alive.”

Hermione looked like she could strangle him. “Actually, I’m supposed to be taking you back to London. Risking my own life was not part of the arrangement.” She stared at the same muggle device he had seen her using the day before, violently poking it again. “Argh!” 

“Something the matter?”

“No transportation near us.” She lifted the device to her ear. “Oui, j’ai besoin d’un taxi. Je suis à l’Hôtel du Parnasse.”  _ Yes, I need a taxi. I’m at the Hotel Parnasse _ . Hermione removed the device from her ear and began poking it again. 

“Going to tell me where we’re going?” Draco asked. Hermione remained silent, so he shoved her arm gently. 

Hermione gasped in pain, dropping her device, and clutched her arm. “Damn it, Malfoy!” She sucked air in through her teeth and breathed out slowly. Her arm was worse than it had been the night before. 

“Merlin, Granger, I barely touched you. In what world are you some sort of war hero?” Draco laughed at her, and she grimaced back. “Wait, Granger, are you seriously hurt?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, reaching down to grab her phone. 

“What’s wrong, Granger?”

Hermione didn’t meet his eye. Truth be told, she was ashamed to still be injured. Draco had been unconscious when she was hexed, and she was disgusted with her inability to either hide the remaining pain or to simply heal. The truth was that her arm had always been a bit weak, ever since Bellatrix Lestrange had taken it upon herself to label it with a blade when Hermione was seventeen. Still, it had never been this slow to heal from an injury. 

Draco snorted. “Look, you can be a martyr on your own time, alright? Right now you’re supposed to be protecting me, and I need to know if my bodyguard is incapacitated.”

Hermione was about to answer when a taxi rolled up next to them. Sweet, blessed distraction.

“Granger, what is this?”

“A car. Muggle transportation.”

“Over my dead body am I getting inside this thing.”

Draco was inside the car, scowling as Hermione exchanged casual pleasantries with the driver and asked him to drive them to Villefranche-sur-Saone. They sat in silence during the half hour trip, Draco fascinated by the vehicle and Hermione deep in her own thoughts. From time to time she would rub the arm he had pushed. 

When they arrived, Hermione asked the driver to leave them at a petrol station and paid in cash. There she led him into a small store where she grabbed a few packets of crisps and two soft drinks. Draco did not recognize even one product available in the store. 

“So what are we doing here?” Draco asked as they sat on the curb outside the store. 

“Eating.”

“Any plans beyond that, or are we just winging it?”

She smirked. “Like I’d tell you.” He rolled his eyes. “You have nightmares, you know.”

Draco tensed. Was she really about to make light of that? She’d been right there, in the same war. “I’d think that’s hardly surprising.”

“You called out Harry’s name.”

“You caught me. I’m secretly in love with him.”

“You sounded scared.”

Draco threw his empty packet of crisps on the ground. “What’s your point, Granger? That I’m not his biggest fan? That’s no secret.”

Hermione frowned. “It was different to hear Harry’s name said as if he were the enemy.”

“He was.”

“Most people would disagree with you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you back a losing horse, isn’t it?” Draco took a deep drink from his can. “Besides, you mean to tell me you never have nightmares?”

“Of course I do,” she scoffed. “I didn’t expect you to, though.” She pulled out her phone and looked up a local taxi company. 

“Is it that shocking to learn that Death Eaters get scared?”

She wasn’t listening anymore. “Oui, bonjour, j’ai besoin d’un taxi au AS24 sur l’Impasse du Moulin de la...” she said. “Parfait, merci.” She shoved the phone into her pocket. She’d need to charge it soon.  _ Yes, hello, I need a taxi at the AS24 on Impasse du Moulin de la... Perfect, thank you. _

Draco glowered at his soft drink. Hermione jumped to her feet and began to stretch. “How’s your head?” she asked. “After last night, I mean.”

“Fine,” he said dismissively. 

“Good. I need to get you back in one piece. I don’t know that they’d pay me fully if you weren’t.”

Draco snorted as a taxi pulled up. Hermione held the door open for him and slammed it when he was barely inside. He was beginning to question his decision to go with her. 


	7. Chapter 7

It was one of those days when things were just going to go wrong. There was no getting around it. They were halfway to Mâcon when their driver pulled over for gas, never to return to the car. 

“Okay, that’s it,” Hermione announced ten minutes after his departure. “We’re getting out.”

“And where do you plan to go?” Hermione’s proclamation had woken Draco up from a much-needed nap. They were in the middle of nowhere. 

“I don’t care, but I have a bad feeling about this. Where’d he go?”

“Probably to take a piss. Calm down, Granger.” Draco settled back against the window. 

“Get up!” Hermione swatted him on the head. “We’re leaving before whatever got that driver comes for us.”

“Nothing got him. You’re crazy.” He had spoken too soon, of course. A terrifyingly tall man was approaching their car, his stride twice as wide as that of a normal man. “Does it look like he’s walking straight toward us?” Draco asked. 

The man made it to Hermione’s door in just a few paces and ripped it open, knocking her off-balance. Draco’s eyes widened and he scrambled for his wand, fleetingly happy to notice that there were no muggles about to witness what was sure to be an extensive display of magic. 

Hermione had regained her balance and sprung from the car. She set to casting a spell, but her wand was knocked from her hand. Mustering her strength she leapt up and wrapped her arms around the man’s neck, trying desperately to strangle him. He grappled with her small form and her foot connected with his groin. At this he gnashed his teeth but did not collapse. Draco was impressed with the man’s stamina.

The man grabbed Hermione by the side of the head and yanked her sideways harshly, almost breaking her neck. When she didn’t let go he smacked her on the side of the head, causing her to collapse on the ground and grasp her now-ringing ear. The man advanced on Draco, who steadied himself and his wand. “Expell-”

Suddenly, Draco’s wand was gone. The man had disarmed him before he had even completed the incantation. Damnation. 

The man grinned and advanced slowly toward Draco, enjoying the fear in the blond man’s eyes. He raised his wand and, just as he began to speak, began to twist in pain. The man groaned, dropping to the ground and beginning to cry. Draco stared at him, entirely confused, before glancing at Hermione. She was sitting on the ground, cradling the arm which had been bothering her earlier, blood trickling from her abused ear, and staring intensely at the man on the ground. Suddenly, she twitched her head and the man rose in the air before slamming against the side of the small store. He collapsed on the ground, quietly moaning before becoming silent and still. 

Hermione glanced at her wand, which shot into her hand. 

Draco was silent and still for a moment before walking over to the man, prodding him with his foot until he was convinced the man was breathing. He returned to Hermione’s side, watching her slowly stand. She moved stiffly, favouring one leg and still holding her arm. The blood from her ear had reached her neck. She had a black eye developing. 

“Wonder who he worked for?” she asked casually, the wince in her voice belying her nonchalance. 

“What the fuck was that, Granger?” Draco asked her. 

She glanced at the man on the ground. “What do you mean? We were attacked.”

“What did you do to him?”

“It was nothing.” She shrugged with her good shoulder. 

“Nothing doesn’t make a man who looks to be a half-giant cry like a child on the ground. Not without a wand and a verbal incantation.” Draco tried to hold her gaze but she looked away. “Damn it, Granger, speak! What just happened?”

“It was the Cruciatus, alright? He was about to kidnap you, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Draco breath quickened in fear. He had known she could be dangerous, but—”Wandless, wordless unforgiveables? When did you learn to do that?”

“It came in handy once or twice during the war.”

“I’m sure.” He had only ever known of two wizards able to perform that kind of magic. Each of them had used it for the wrong reasons. “You know, the only other people to do that were—”

“Dumbledore and Voldemort, yeah.” She grabbed their bags from the ground and tossed his bag at him. “It was a chance encounter with the latter which inspired me to learn how to do it. Come on.” She started limping down the road. 

“Got somewhere to be?”

“We have to make it to Mâcon and I don’t want to put any more muggle taxi drivers in danger. Lord knows what happened to this one.”

“How far a walk is this, Granger?” 

Hermione pulled out her phone and found a route. “Just over four hours.” Draco cursed under his breath. 

The first hour was silent and passed without incident. Hermione was stubbornly pretending she wasn’t limping, and Draco was happy to let her suffer in silence. The second hour was excruciatingly dull, and Hermione’s limp was getting worse. Draco was beginning to get a bit concerned. After all, it was clear that she was his ticket to making it back to London without being murdered. He hadn’t done as well against any of their attackers as she had. He needed her in one piece. 

“Granger, let me take your bag.”

“Didn’t know you were such a gentleman, Draco.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going to need each other to get home safely, and I can’t have you injured before we make it there.” He was too proud to admit that he needed her protection more than she needed his by a very wide margin. “Give me the bag.”

Hermione clutched the bag closer to her chest. 

“What, got a picture of your boyfriend in there?” Draco sneered. 

“I take care of my own things,” she said simply. 

“What do you think is going to happen? I’m going to abscond with your knickers?”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “Look, I don’t know how you ran things in the Death Eater camps, but I always carry my own bag. Every person is responsible for themselves. Nobody is a burden to the cause.”

Draco was silent for a moment before he began to laugh. Deep, hearty belly laughs which seemed out of place on his exhausted face. “What cause? We aren’t at war, Granger. We’re walking hundreds of fucking miles and I’m offering to carry your bag because you’re hurt. You don’t have to be a soldier forever.” Hermione stared at him and he roughly grabbed her bag, throwing it over his shoulder. “Come on, then,” he said. “We’ve got two hours to go, apparently.”

Hermione grimaced and vowed to hide her injuries better. Limping ahead of him, she led them northward. He was wrong, of course. She would always be a soldier. She would never shake the triggers which made her fuzzy and brought her right back to the battle field, or the way the back of her neck prickled when she was being watched by unseen eyes. These lessons had been ingrained in her as a child, and had saved her life on untold occasions. Besides, who was she if not a soldier? Take being a soldier away from her and who was she except a woman with a large bookshelf? 

It was at hour three that Hermione collapsed. This piqued Draco’s concern again. In war he had seen her practically skip away from much worse than she had suffered earlier that day. 

“Are you daft?” he demanded through gritted teeth as he dropped their bags and stood in front of her. The blood from her ear now trailed beneath the collar of her shirt. “Why haven’t you healed yourself yet?”

“It isn’t that bad,” Hermione lied, but it came out in a strained moan. 

“You’re a goddamn liar, Granger,” Draco said, sitting down next to her. “Heal yourself. I’m rubbish at it.”

“We’ve already used too much magic in public,” she sighed. “We can’t risk it any more.”

“So you plan to die here? Seems inglorious.” 

“Give me a minute.” Hermione sat in silence, scanning the horizon and nervously glancing behind them. 

“I really don’t think we’re going to be attacked here,” Draco drawled. 

“We’re sitting ducks. How in the name of all that is good did you survive that blasted war? You have the worst instincts for survival.” 

Draco shrugged. Luck had certainly played a major part in his survival, but he didn’t need to admit his incompetence to her. 

The silence stretched out between them, as did the time. The sun had charted its course across the sky in the time they had been there and there was pink on the horizon. At long last Hermione struggled to her feet. 

“Feeling better?” he asked. 

“I’m well enough to walk,” she said, scanning the horizon once more. “Let’s go.” She was still limping. 

By the time they reached Mâcon it was dark again. Hermione cursed. “We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get our train.” 

“I have to say, Granger, that I am seeing a lot more of France than I have ever cared to.” She ignored him and searched for local motels on her phone, leading him to a small establishment not far from the Gare de Mâcon. “So where are we headed after Mâcon?” he asked as they entered their room. 

She locked the door behind them. “Dijon, and then Paris before taking a bus to London.

“The Knight Bus?” he asked, his eyebrows raised in hope. Hermione laughed. 

“Nope, a muggle bus. Sorry.”

Draco sighed. “I should’ve known not to hope.” He stretched his arms high above his head, trying to relieve some of the tension from the day. Hermione settled into a chair. “Plan on sleeping tonight, Granger?” She shook her head, and he scoffed. “Oh come on, after today? You need rest. You need to heal.” She shrugged. “Ridiculous,” he sighed, quickly slipping out of his clothes and into the bed. His toes curled in happiness at being covered by soft blankets. 

“You sleep,” she said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.” 

Draco sat up. “Granger, we have already established that I am not about to run off. I don’t fancy being murdered by any gangsters. I would honestly rather pay taxes. You need to sleep.” 

“So nice of you to look out for me,” Hermione said, the sarcasm muted by a yawn. 

“Yeah, well, someone’s got to,” he said, laying back down. “You may have good instincts for battle but you’re terrible at actually taking care of yourself.” 

Hermione sighed. “I’ve made it this far.” 

“By the skin of your teeth, I’m sure.” 

The two sat in silence, a small desk lamp next to Hermione illuminating the room and casting long shadows across the striped walls. “Why did you join the war, Draco?” 

Draco groaned in response. “Can we not have deep war talk tonight?”

“Just answer the question. I deserve to know a bit about the person I’m risking my life for here.”

Draco grimaced. He knew which answer she expected. It was the answer they all expected. “Because I’m a monster, all right? I’m a terrible person who gets off on the suffering of others.” 

She snorted. “Fine. Don’t answer.”

Draco stared at the ceiling for a short while. “Would you believe me that I never meant it?” 

“Not really, no.” 

Fair enough. “Would you believe me that I didn’t know what I was signing up for?” 

“Did any of us?”

“I suppose not.” With that, Draco drifted off into another fitful sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

When Draco awoke the next morning, Hermione was standing in front of a small mirror mounted to the wall, her wand pointed at her black eye. She muttered an incantation and screwed up her face in pain as the bruising disappeared. She then lifted her shirt just the slightest, revealing her waist, more scars than he could count, and a bloody cut which he hadn’t noticed the day before. This, too, she spelled away, leaving another scar. It must have been nasty to have left such a nasty scar even after being healed by magic. She picked up a small towel and blotted the blood which had dried down the side of her face, gently prodding her ear with her wand and wincing. She then placed the towel between her teeth, biting down on it hard as she cast a healing spell on her leg. She grunted in pain, but slowly rotated her ankle and then tested her weight on her leg, nodding in satisfaction. She kept the towel between her teeth as she turned her wand on her arm. She squeezed her eyes shut, and a short burst of light connected her wand and her arm. The towel fell to the ground as she screamed, and her wand fell from her grasp. She grabbed her arm again and whimpered softly. 

“Granger, what happened to your arm?”

Hermione jumped, scrambling for her wand. 

“Just me!” Draco assured her. “Just me, your ward, not here to hurt you, rather relying on you for my own survival.” 

She let out a deep breath. “You scared me.” 

“Yeah, well, that arm is scaring me.” He pushed his blankets down and pulled on his clothes from the day before. “You look like shit, Granger.” 

She really did. Even with so many of her injuries healed, the circles under her eyes were dominating her face. Her sunken eyes had lost their sheen. Her hair, already a mess on the best of days, was piled in an unruly nest on her head. Despite her best efforts she was still moving with a slight limp. Her face was pale and bloodless, but shiny with sweat. 

She sat down, breathing shakily. 

“Granger, what’s wrong?” Draco approached her and, before she could object, grabbed her arm. She drew a sharp breath. “Good Lord, Granger, your arm is burning up.” She removed it from his grasp and gently rubbed it. 

“It was just some hex. I used a counter-hex on it not five minutes later.”

“Which hex?”

“It was in a language I didn’t recognize.”

Draco nodded. “I thought you were good at healing?”

“Only minor things.”

“So this isn’t minor, then. Not to rain on our mad dash from France, but perhaps you should seek medical help.”

Hermione shook her head. “No. We can’t risk being found, and if we go to any wizarding spaces they will find us.”

“I can’t risk being found,” Draco reminded her. “You’re nobody to these people. Leave me be, and you go get help.”

Hermione held her arm a bit tighter. “It is my job to get you back to London. I’m not leaving.”

He laughed in incredulity. “Granger, I’m wanted for tax evasion. I’m hardly a criminal mastermind. I’m certainly not worth risking your own life.” She stared pointedly at the wall opposite her, never making eye contact with him. “Of course,” he sneered, “you just can’t walk away from a job. Martyrdom only sounds good in stories, Granger. In real life it’s stupid.” He turned to walk away and Hermione dashed after him, not trusting him not to escape. The sudden movement upset her leg again and she was on the ground, scrambling to get up. Draco’s feet appeared in front of her and she slowly found her balance again. “I wasn’t going anywhere, Granger. You are, though.” He handed her the cardigan from his bag. “You have a fever. Go see a doctor.” 

“We need to—”

“You aren’t fit to travel, Granger. You’re sick. You got hexed, you weren’t good enough to fix it, and now you’re sick.” Hermione lowered her eyes in shame. She was too weak to argue. “You’d be in better shape if you had slept, but you’re a stubborn idiot and so you didn’t and here we are.” Hermione made no attempt to move, and Draco sighed. “Get into bed, then, Granger. You need rest.” She started to protest, and Draco held his hand up to silence her. “I’m not going anywhere. First of all, if I leave you and you die, I think I might be culpable, and Azakaban was terrible. Second, as far as I’m concerned everybody in France wants to kill me except you, and I don’t feel like tackling them solo.”

Hermione’s shoulders dropped in defeat and she made her way to the bed Draco had recently vacated. 

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked her, too amused for her liking. 

“What?” Hermione croaked. 

“You’re meant to sleep in your pants, Granger.”

Hermione scowled as she stripped down to her knickers and a t-shirt and slipped between the sheets. She dropped quite quickly into a dreamless sleep and Draco took the opportunity to rinse the clothes he had worn the two days prior in the bathroom sink. He considered washing Hermione’s, too, but decided that forcing her to sleep was enough kindness for one day. 

As his clothes hung to dry, he watched her sleep. He supposed this was what she had done while he slept and she kept guard. The idea creeped him out just a bit. 

She only had the one scar on her face, but he had seen an intricate network of scars on her legs as she was crawling into bed. Her injured arm slipped out from underneath the blankets as she slept, and he silently approached to analyse it. As he leaned over her, he swallowed dryly. He recognized one of these scars. He had been there as his Aunt Bellatrix had carved “Mudblood” into Granger’s arm over and over, demanding information and practically dancing with glee as Hermione had sobbed on the floor. He had half expected her to die that day. The offending word was now dark against her otherwise pale skin, with a series of smaller scars intersecting it. One or two appeared to have been caused by magic. 

“I tried to spell it off,” Hermione mumbled, making Draco jump. 

“Knowing Aunt Bell it was likely done with a cursed blade. Nothing you could do.” 

Hermione nodded weakly. “I figured as much.” She pulled her arm back beneath the blanket, hiding it from his view. “I think I should get up.” 

Draco laughed. “Not a chance.”

“You’re stupid,” Hermione said quietly, burrowing further down into her blankets and falling asleep again. She looked like a corpse.

Draco was starting to doze off when Hermione started moaning. “No,” she whispered. “No, don’t, please don’t.” She tossed and he made his way to the side of the bed. He watched as Hermione pleaded for mercy from her invisible tormentor. Suddenly Draco fell to the floor in pain, clutching his sides and gritting his teeth. He couldn’t get to his wand on time, having left it on the table across the room. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He didn’t even know who was attacking him. 

Suddenly Hermione screamed in her sleep and bolted up in bed, awake and wild eyed. Draco’s pain stopped. 

“Draco?” she croaked, worry colouring her voice.

“Here,” he said weakly. 

“Why are you on the ground?”

“I don’t know, I was suddenly in this excruciating pain and I collapsed. You were having a nightmare, I was checking on you. It sounded like you were pleading for your life, or maybe fighting, or—” Hermione’s eyes darkened and realization slammed into him like a pallet of bricks. “How often does that happen?”

“Well, normally when I have nightmares nobody else is around.” She was disgusted with herself. It had been over a decade, and she still couldn’t control it.

“Wandless, nonverbal curses are impressive enough, Granger. But in your sleep?” Draco stood up and Hermione looked away. “That’s just dangerous.” She ducked her head. “Who else knows?”

“Nobody,” she whispered. “They’d want to lock me up somewhere and medicate me and try to fix me.” 

Draco scoffed. “Seems to me like some fixing might do you some good, actually. This is seriously fucked up. You could really hurt someone.”

“I’m sorry.” 

He sighed. “Yeah, well, good. How’re you feeling?”

“Not great. You?”

“I’ll live. Won’t be putting my wand down around you ever again, though.” Hermione smiled weakly and lay back down.

“Sorry,” she muttered, falling into a blessedly dreamless sleep. 

Her fever broke that evening, and she woke up around eight. Hermione blinked her bleary eyes and glanced around her. She was in an unfamiliar room. She grabbed her wand from the bedside table and shot up. 

“Woah, tiger,” a familiar voice said. “Careful now. You aren’t allowed to curse me until you get me back to London.”

Draco Malfoy was sipping some tea on the other side of the room. Of course. It was coming back to her. She was in Mâcon and had been injured. She was taking Malfoy to London. She had cursed him rather nastily. 

“Are you okay?” she asked him, her throat dry. 

“I am doing spectacularly, thank you,” he said. “Turns out I’m better at healing myself than you are.” He placed a glass of water next to her and she gratefully drank it. He took a seat and stared at her. “That was some display earlier. What the hell did they have you doing during that war to have dreams bad enough that you cast dangerous curses in your sleep?”

Hermione shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Draco smirked, but it was without mirth. “I knew a lot of people in that war and saw a lot of fighting, and I have never known anybody to be so constantly on edge that they accidentally curse people in their sleep. Though cursing people in your dreams wouldn’t be such a big deal if you weren’t actually capable of wandless, wordless curses.” 

“Nothing in particular happened to me,” she insisted. “The war was hell for everyone. We all have our demons.”

“How’s your arm?” 

“Much better!” Hermione said brightly. “Not perfect, but much better, and my leg seems fine. Provided we don’t get attacked anymore I think we might just be able to travel again today.”

“Today is over,” Draco informed her. “You slept all day.” Hermione peered at the darkness outside the window and groaned. They had lost a whole day. “Nothing to do but chat.” She sighed and glared at him. “So out with it. What were you doing during that war to fuck you up this badly?”

“Nothing nobody else was doing, and nothing I didn’t sign up for.” 

“What did you sign up for?”

“Well, we were always going to be pretty central, what with Voldemort’s obsession with Harry. So of course I saw a lot of action, and had a few near misses.” She cleared her throat. “What were you doing?”

“Throwing a lot of curses without knowing how effective they were. You weren’t wrong the other day when you said I couldn’t have been a great soldier. We aren’t talking about me, though.”

Hermione was silent for a minute. “Look, everyone made sacrifices.”

“What kinds of near misses?” He had never heard of her being captured, save the time she had been brought to his house when he was seventeen.

“It’s war. People get caught. People get tortured. We couldn’t risk Harry, but as his best friend and as a muggleborn I was as good a piece of bait as any.” 

“Bait?” Draco’s eyes narrowed. “They used you as bait?”

“Sure,” she said. “It was usually my idea. The Order always had my back, of course, except—”

“Except for when they didn’t?”

“Except for when something else came up.” She swallowed.

“They must have had a field day with you,” Draco said, leaning back. “I never even heard of your capture. You’d think they’d have wanted to brag about that.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine what they’d have done with you that it was kept secret. Not that I was ever high-ranking enough to really be in the know, of course, so maybe it doesn’t mean anything that I didn’t know.” He scanned the ceiling tiles, lost in thought. 

Hermione felt like she was stuck inside of herself. Her breathing became shallow. Her vision went blurry and her heart was pounding. She couldn’t hear Draco anymore. It was as if he were talking to her through a thick fog. She tried to speak but the words were stuck in her throat. She couldn’t get her tongue to work. She tried to move her hands but they had turned to stone.

She was on a hard floor, tied uncomfortably with an unforgiving rope. She heard the men in the next room discussing her. What information they could get from her. What they could do to her. How they could kill her. She shivered against the cold floor, wiggling her limbs as best she could to check for any breaks. Her temple throbbed.

In the hotel room, Hermione began to tremble ever so slightly. Draco finally looked her way when the slightest whimper escaped her.

Hermione tried to work up the energy to curse the men. They had taken her wand, of course, but they were unaware of what she could do. Thank god she had learned. She smiled wryly when she realized that she had Voldemort to thank for this particular skill. These men didn’t realize that she was going to kill them with her thoughts alone, and that she would even enjoy it. She focussed on casting a Killing Curse at the first man she heard.

Back in the hotel, Draco sucked in his breath as he felt a sting in his hand. Wherever Hermione was, she was fighting. He had seen this happen to other wizards in Azkaban, and tried to remember how some of his fellow inmates had helped them. 

He sat in front of her and took her hands gently in his. “Alright, Hermione, wherever you are, come back,” he said firmly. “It isn’t real. You aren’t there. You’re here with me.”

Hermione felt a tugging. She started fighting against her bonds. 

Draco held on tighter to her hands as Hermione began to thrash. “Come on, Hermione. You’re safe. You’re okay. You aren’t in danger. You aren’t there.”

The tugging got stronger, and Hermione’s vision blurred. She fought harder, no longer listening to the men’s voices. She was singularly focussed on this unknown tugging. She was being taken somewhere. She was being kidnapped. No, that didn’t happen here. She wasn’t kidnapped from here, she had been brought here. So where was she going? She fought harder, but had no more energy. She felt herself slipping away. 

Hermione was putting up one hell of a fight, and Draco almost lost his grip on her when she stilled. He looked up to meet her eyes and saw they were scared and shiny, but alert and present. She was back. 

“Where’d you go?” he asked. She shook her head. 

“Nowhere important. Thanks for bringing me back.”

“Can’t have you running off anywhere,” he said, smiling weakly. “You need to get me back to London. I have thugs to avoid and taxes to pay.” 

She nodded, looking down at his hands enclosing hers. She squeezed his fingers lightly. “Thanks.”


	9. Chapter 9

They were both bored and starving, so Hermione and Draco had walked to a nearby newsstand to pick up snacks and some magazines. Back in their room Draco was lazily flipping through one of these, interested to learn that muggles also played sports. Hermione was taking a shower in the washroom, trying to wash away some of the horror of the past day. 

Hermione sighed as the hot water pounded down on her stiff neck. She had decided not to tell Draco that the light zap he had felt while she was dissociating was an attempt at a Killing Curse. It was bad enough that she had successfully tortured him earlier. She sat down on the shower floor and curled her knees against her chest. She had never once before had a Ministry contract go so sideways. Leave it to Draco Malfoy to take the simplest job in the world and make it impossible. 

She sighed again and rested her head against the cool tile. They would make it back to London tomorrow, at which point Draco’s safety would be the Ministry’s problem. From the next room, she heard Draco bark in laughter. She had already spent too long in the shower. Anything could happen while she was in there. 

Hermione stood again and rubbed a generous amount of conditioner into her hair, and then grabbed her toothbrush to clean her mouth as the conditioner set. She spat on the shower floor, a mixture of toothpaste and blood making its way to the drain. She must have bit her tongue during one of her nightmares, or maybe when she dissociated. It wouldn’t have been the first time. She leaned back under the water, smoothing the conditioner out of her hair. How much blood had she seen go shower drains in her lifetime?

Her knees buckled from exhaustion and she slid down the tile wall to the floor again. She wasn’t positive she could stand, nor was she quite ready to leave the warmth. She breathed in deeply and held her sides, blinking back the tears which pricked at her eyes. Vulnerability wasn't smart. Tears weren’t allowed.

From the other side of the door, Draco heard Hermione sniffling in the shower. “Granger,” he asked, knocking awkwardly on the door. “You alright in there?” No response. He knocked a bit harder. “Granger? Are you okay?” Silence. 

Draco wasn’t sure what to think. It wasn’t like Hermione to cry, so there must be something seriously wrong in there. He wasn’t thrilled about the idea of seeing her in the shower, but if she were hurt he had to help. He inhaled deeply and opened the door, eyes closed. 

Hermione heard the door open and flinched. Her wand was on the counter. She was too exhausted to perform any wandless magic. She had forgotten the cardinal rule: always have your wand in reach. 

Thankfully, it was just Draco. He was covering his eyes and holding a towel toward her. “Granger, I heard tears. Are you okay?”

Hermione sniffled, turned off the water, and grabbed the towel. “I’m fine.”

“Decent?” Draco asked. 

“Relatively.” 

Her hair was spread down her back, the curls flattened by the water. Her undereye circles were a bit less pronounced, and the heat of the shower had brought some colour back to her cheeks. Her eyes were a bit red from tears, but still fierce. Lord, she was small, though. The way she carried herself made Hermione seem extremely formidable, but here she was, small and shivering in her towel. It was difficult to imagine this slight thing anywhere near a battle, let alone offering herself up as bait. He wanted to hug her, but didn’t even know how he would go about doing that. He took a step back instead. 

“Why the tears, Granger?”

“No reason,” she said thickly. “Stress.”

Draco nodded awkwardly and left. Hermione quickly towelled off and pulled on some clothes. Leaving the washroom she glanced at herself in the mirror, trying to push her hair behind her ear in an attractive way before giving up and letting it run wild as it always did. 

Draco watched her as she approached the bed where he was laid out reading another muggle magazine. This one was giving him makeup tips. Hermione laughed softly when she saw it. “Good read?”

He tossed it aside. “I’ve read worse.” He analyzed her solemnly. “Weird day, huh?”

She quickly raised her eyebrows. “I’ll say.” 

“You should get some sleep.”

“I slept all day, it’s your turn.” 

“You had a fever all day coupled with a violent nightmare and a dissociation episode. You need sleep.”

“I’m dangerous in my sleep,” she protested. “You know that.” 

“I’ll keep my wand on me,” he assured her, his voice betraying no patience for protest. “Look, Granger, I can’t make you get better, but you’re no good to anyone if you have a complete breakdown. What I can do is insist you sleep tonight.” 

Hermione stared at Draco. He wasn’t going to back down, she could see it. “Fine,” she sighed. “Get out.” 

Draco was outraged. “Get out? No. I’ll move over, but that chair is wildly uncomfortable and I’m not reading there all night.” Hermione rolled her eyes and pulled off her jeans, shoving him roughly as she crawled under the covers. He smirked and moved to the side, making space for her next to him. “So violent.”

Hermione pulled the sheets up to her chin, and Draco placed his wand right next to him on the bed. He wouldn’t be unprepared this time. Soon her breathing was deep and even, and Draco was sure she was asleep. He returned to the magazine and an article about how to achieve multiple orgasms. It wasn’t relevant to his own personal needs, but he never minded learning how to be better in bed. It might come in handy one day, if any woman ever deigned to look at him again. 

Hermione shifted in her sleep, beginning to mutter and her breath quickened. Draco grabbed his wand. She twisted slightly, her muttering becoming pleading. “No, let him go,” she whispered. “Take me. Take me.” Draco wondered where she went in her sleep and when she went into that state earlier. “Kill me instead,” she whispered, this time more urgently. “Mudblood friend—just as good.” Draco wondered again what had happened to her that she begged for death in her dreams. She turned again, this time pressing herself against Draco. He went very still and gripped his wand tighter. They stayed this way, her tensed against his side and him still as a statue, until her breathing became slow and even again. He slowly released his wand. Hermione wrapped her arm around Draco’s waist, and he shifted to accommodate her, dropping an arm around her shoulder. He gently traced the scars on her arm with his finger, wondering if her dreams ever took him back to his manor and Aunt Bell. He hoped they didn’t.

When Draco awoke the next morning, two things occurred to him simultaneously. First, he had not been meant to fall asleep. Second, Hermione Granger was laying next to him, staring at him with intense eyes. 

“Morning,” he groaned. 

“Good morning,” she said quietly. “How did you sleep?”

He groaned again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” 

“It’s okay. Nothing happened.” She ran her eyes over his sleep-tousled hair. “I slept really well,” she told him. “Only one nightmare, and it wasn’t even that bad. That hasn’t happened in… well, I don’t think that’s happened before.”

He nodded. “I slept pretty well, too.” 

“Did I hurt you?”

“No. You cuddled with me, though.” 

Hermione blushed, an unexpectedly innocent reaction from such a powerful and fearless witch. “I know. When I woke up we—” She quickly looked away. 

He laughed and stretched his arms out above him. 

“How did that happen?” she asked, staring at the scar which ran the length of his left arm. He sat up and stretched his arm out to her, resting his forearm gently on the bed between them, palm up. 

“It isn’t a good story. I fell off a broom.” 

“You couldn’t have slowed your fall?”

“Reflexes weren’t fast enough. We were escaping after a battle. I was exhausted.” 

Hermione nodded, and gently prodded the scar where it crossed the Dark Mark. “I didn’t mind having that messed up,” he said quietly. Hermione swallowed and continued to trail her finger along the scar up his arm. Draco sat still, barely breathing. They were both silent. When she reached the end of the scar at his shoulder she glanced at his face, only to find him staring at her with unreadable eyes. She looked away, and began tracing the scar back down, goosebumps breaking out on his skin wherever she made contact with him. She followed the scar down to his hand where it marred his palm, and his hand gently closed around her fingers. 

She turned her face to him and met his eyes. There was fear there. He was scared of her. She supposed she was scared of him, too. She dropped her eyes to their hands and leaned against his shoulder, closing the gap between their sides.

What was she doing? Not just what was she doing being cuddly with Draco Malfoy, but what was she doing being cuddly with someone for whom she was professionally responsible? This wasn’t a romantic weekend away, it was a job. She had to get him home, she didn’t have time for hotel dalliances. 

Would it have been a dalliance? Did she want this to go so far as to be a dalliance? 

Hermione tried to pull away and found that Draco was holding her hand too tightly for her to do so. “Don’t,” he murmured, releasing her hand and wrapping his arm around her waist. “Aren’t you sick of it?” 

“Sick of what?” she asked, turning her face up to him. 

“Of all of this. The fighting, and the nightmares, and being Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger.”

She paused at this. “I don’t know that I know how to be anyone else.” 

He stared at the bedspread, holding her as if he expected her to break and running his free hand through his hair. “You’re always ready to die, aren’t you? Last night as you slept you were begging someone to kill you. I heard you talking in your sleep.” Hermione looked away. As they all were, that particular dream had been based on true events. She had been lucky to get out of that one intact. He squeezed her a bit tighter. “And now you’re on this stupid mission to protect me, of all people, and it’s clear you’re falling apart but you won’t just slow down and take care of yourself. You aren’t a soldier anymore, Granger. You can stop.”

“What if a soldier is all I know how to be?” she asked him quietly. 

He gently tilted her chin up. She held her breath. “You’ve always been a bit of a swot,” he whispered as she giggled. “Maybe it’s time to find something else.” With that, he gently pressed his lips to hers.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that this chapter is explicitly sexual. If you are underage or uncomfortable with reading sexual material, please feel free to skip this chapter. Doing so will in no way impede your ability to follow the plot.

How long had it been since she had kissed anyone? She supposed that if she required any amount of time to work that out, it meant it had been a while. She found kissing difficult. Not the mechanics of it, of course. She had trouble letting herself get swept up in it. When she was at Hogwarts she had been young and carefree, able to let down her guard and truly throw herself into a kiss. There was no room for forgetting herself like that anymore, not with the life she had led. 

Draco moved his lips against hers, coaxing her to respond. Her traitorous body answered before she could decide what to do and she felt herself moan. His hand came up to cup the side of her face and she sighed into the kiss. 

Here she was, not only kissing someone on the job, but on a job which she had seriously messed up. She was kissing Draco Malfoy, no less. This was unideal for Hermione Granger. But then, maybe Draco had been right. Maybe she was tired of being Hermione Granger. It felt natural to set her worries aside, if just for a few moments, and let herself be the woman he was encouraging her to be with his wicked tongue and gentle touches. 

He was reclining them both back down to the pillows, parting her lips with his tongue. She froze for just a second

“I won’t hurt you,” he whispered. Damn her if she didn’t trust him. 

They lay facing each other, her hands on his shoulders and his hand on her waist, tongues gently warring as they explored new mouths and new sensations. Hermione whimpered as Draco pulled his mouth from hers and kissed the spot where her neck met her jaw, and gripped his shoulders tighter as he gently sucked on her neck. He flicked his tongue out to soothe the resulting mark and Hermione almost choked on the sparks which were flying from the pit of her stomach. 

She grabbed his hair and pulled his face back to hers. Draco smiled at her impatience, but obligingly returned his mouth to hers, rolling her onto her back and propping himself up at her side. He wrapped his arm back around her waist and pulled himself tight against her. She sighed. 

Draco hadn’t felt this good in a long time. Witches hadn’t exactly been flocking to his bed ever since he was released from Azkaban, and when he had found someone to sleep with it had never been quite this fun. Hermione was soft in his arms but quick and passionate in her responses to his every move, and the way she was sighing against him was kindling to the deep want which was developing low in his stomach. 

He understood her apprehension. They were being hunted, and he was quite literally her enemy. Still, he had thought that over the past few days their history had started to give way to something like friendship. He had so resented her before. Not only was she a muggleborn, which of course was a group with which he had never associated, but she never seemed to make a wrong move, did she? After that war the media had raved about her. Everything she did delighted them. She had even opened up that stupid detective agency on a whim and that had gone well, too. And wandless, wordless curses the strength of which the world had only ever seen twice before? Did she have to be good at everything? 

He wasn’t resenting her inability to make a wrong move when she cupped his face and pulled him on top of her, lips never leaving his. He had one leg between hers and was propping himself above her with his elbows, careful not to crush her. She wrapped a leg around his waist, and he moaned gutterally into her mouth. Pulling away and burying his face in her hair, he trailed kisses down her neck. She cried out. 

Draco tamped down the desire that shot through him. Here she was, trembling beneath him, more human than he had ever known her to be. He pushed his thigh against her and she rubbed against him ever so lightly, whimpering. He felt her pulse speed up beneath his lips and smiled. 

Hermione could feel Draco smiling against her neck, and pulled his head up to kiss her again. Lord, he was good at kissing. He rubbed his thigh against her and she arched her back, moaning in pleasure, pressing her breasts to his chest. He groaned and raised his hand to her breast, lightly rubbing her nipple through the fabric. His hands felt perfect on her. She gasped, breaking their kiss. 

Draco chuckled as she pulled his head down and nipped at his ear. The chuckle turned into a moan as she trailed her lips down his neck, panting against him. Her breath danced down his neck in short, hot puffs, and he trembled. She ran her hand down his chest, lightly scratching him through his shirt. He tensed as her hand reached his abs and he locked eyes with her, trying to memorize how they blazed at him.

“Off,” she commanded, tugging gently on the shirt. 

It took all of his strength for Draco to pause. “Are you sure?” There was messing around for a bit, and there was crossing that line. 

“Fuck professionalism,” she whispered, and he laughed, pulling off his shirt. Hermione looked at his chest appreciatively and growled deep in her throat. 

“I’d rather you fuck—” his quip was cut short as she yanked him down and kissed him hungrily. 

Hermione felt like she was on fire. She had had sex since the war, of course, and even during it, but it had almost always been quick and to the point. She had an itch, she found someone to scratch it. It had been years since she let herself burn like this. She had forgotten how rewarding passion could be. 

She flipped them over, straddling Draco and rubbing against him. He moaned and ran his hands up her thighs and over her hips to squeeze her bum. She pulled her t-shirt over her head and it was all he could do not to buck up against her. “Where have you been hiding this body, Granger?”

She scowled at him and swatted his chest. He laughed and stared hungrily at her breasts. They had some scarring, which he expected. Just like him, her torso was criss-crossed with scars, like some kind of divine star chart. Her belly was soft and curved, and he carefully traced a scar from her waist to her navel. His face looked awfully close to reverent as his hands memorized her curves. She watched him silently, flushed and panting lightly. Who could ever have wanted to hurt this woman? 

She leaned forward, running her hands over his arms, brushing his Dark Mark. Of course. He had wanted to hurt her. Well, he wouldn’t be hurting her today. 

He held her waist and gently pulled her down to him, kissing her softly before latching onto her breast, sucking and teasing her nipple into a stiff peak while she writhed on his lap. “Draco,” she whined.

Hearing her say his name in that way did something visceral to him. He grabbed her hips and flipped them over, covering her body with his and greedily kissing every bit of skin that he could reach. She wrapped both her legs around his waist and he pressed against her, groaning in frustration when he realized they were both clothed. He worked his way down her body, kissing her mouth, her neck, her chest, her soft stomach, and her thighs, tugging at her knickers and tossing them aside. She held her breath in anticipation as he threw her legs over his shoulders and pressed his tongue hard against her core. 

“Fuck,” she moaned slowly, the word dragged from the very pit of her stomach. Draco growled in response. He teased her with his tongue, lapping lightly at her as she mewled and scratched his back, and for the first time in his life Draco prayed for scarring. Her hand tangled in his hair and she begged for more, her words tripping over one another as she urged him on in a low and continuous stream. He was happy to oblige, slowly pushing one finger inside of her. She moaned wantonly and he hissed in pleasure as he felt her tightness squeezing his finger. 

He rested his forehead against her hip as he slowly fingered her. She was a whimpering mess, and barely coherent. He glanced up and was gratified to see that her face was screwed up in complete pleasure, eyes squeezed tight and lips trembling. She reached up and grabbed one of her breasts, toying with her nipple and moaning deeply. Draco growled and dove back in, circling her clit with his tongue as he fingered her roughly. 

“More,” she whispered, barely able to finish the word.

He quickly added a second finger inside of her and sucked lightly on her clit, groaning as he felt her tighten around his fingers and heard her cry out her climax. God, she was tight. He continued to finger her gently as she came down and shuddered when he felt her gently stroke his hair. 

“Your turn,” she whispered. Too right it was. He was wound like a spring. 

She went to kiss him lazily in her post-orgasmic bliss, but he was too far gone for that. He kissed her roughly, enthusiastically grabbing the back of her head as she pressed herself against him and moaned. 

Suddenly he was on his back and Hermione had crawled on top of him. “Wandless magic has its fun uses, too,” she said. 

“Saucy minx,” he grinned, grabbing onto her waist. She circled her hips over him, resenting that he still wore his jeans. She pressed down onto his lap, and he grunted at how good her weight felt on him. 

She swung off of him and he made a sound of protest. “Trousers off,” she instructed. 

Draco had never followed any order as quickly as he did that one. His trousers and pants were on the ground and he was back in bed in a flash. Hermione sat comfortably next to him, biting her lip in appreciation as she examined his reclining and naked body. She lightly touched his stomach and he took a sharp breath. 

She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his chest, enjoying the way he tensed beneath her. She kissed her way up to his neck, where he grabbed her face in his hands and pulled her down into a searing kiss. Her hand ventured southward, lighting grasping him. He grunted against her lips, and she laughed gently. She began stroking him with more purpose, roughly matching the rhythm their tongues had established. She moaned as she felt him jump in her hand. 

“Stop messing around, Granger,” Draco said against her mouth, lightly nipping at her bottom lip. She didn’t have to be told twice, swinging her leg to straddle him. She carefully aligned their cores and then slowly pressed down on top of him. 

Draco threw his head back with a growl as Hermione slid down his length, bucking up against her as she went. Hermione couldn’t think of a time she had felt this exquisitely full. Slowly rocking against him, she savoured his every move inside of her. She giggled as he grabbed her hips and tried to coax her into moving faster. “Patience,” she warned him. He smiled ruefully. She had never seen him look so carefree. 

She spread her palms on his chest and slowly pushed them upwards, bracing herself against his shoulders and establishing a rocking rhythm which, if his moans were anything to go by, suited him just fine. She let out a breathy moan and sighed his name, quickly unravelling his patience. He grabbed her hips tightly, slamming her down onto him. She was sure she would have bruises, but couldn’t care less. It had been far too long since she had had any fun bruises. 

Draco wasn’t going to last much longer. He wasn’t sure if it was how long it had been, the fact that he was buried inside of someone he had long considered a mortal enemy, or some natural talent of hers, but he had never had sex this good. He could die in that moment and be quite happy. She was so hot and wet and tight, and she was giving as good as she got. 

Hermione slammed down onto him and squeezed him even tighter. He moaned her name, completely delirious. She became very still, except that she was still squeezing him inside her. He whined in frustration. She leaned down, her breasts pressing against his chest and her hair tickling his cheek. She kissed him lightly, quick as a flash. He nearly finished then and there. “I like when you say my name,” she whispered in his ear, nipping his earlobe. 

He was done for. He slammed his hips up into her over and over again, whispering her name like a prayer as she whimpered and moaned. He was so close. She had to finish. 

He reached down between their sweaty bodies and rubbed the bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs, and he felt her collapse around him, squeezing him inside her tighter than he could have imagined. Her orgasm slammed into her like a truck and she screamed his name. He couldn’t hold it back any longer. You don’t just say no to a supernova like Hermione Granger. With a prolonged groan his orgasm washed over him, starting in his toes and causing his eyes to roll back in his head. 

They were silent for a short while, each one gasping for air and recovering their voices. Hermione had collapsed against Draco’s chest and her hair was covering his face. He pushed it aside, and she tried to move off of him. Grunting, he wrapped his arms around her and held her in place. 

“Am I not allowed to leave?” she laughed. 

“No.” She felt him smile against her neck. 

Hermione’s knees were beginning to cramp, so she sat upright and smiled down at the wizard between her thighs before climbing off of him and laying down on her side next to him. She stretched out her legs and nearly purred. He turned on his side to watch her. 

“You aren’t half bad at that, Granger,” he said, rubbing her arm. 

“That isn’t what you called me a minute ago,” she said. 

He smirked playfully. “So does this mean we’re friends now, Hermione?”

She grinned. “Something like that.” She shifted closer to him and he lay back, letting her rest her head on his shoulder. His arm wrapped around her waist and he slowly stroked her hair. “I could sleep,” she murmured. “Really sleep.”

He knew what she meant. No nightmares could touch him at that moment. “I wish,” he murmured. 

Hermione let out a groan of protest. “I don’t want to get up. Don’t remind me.” He squeezed her a bit tighter to his side, but the damage was done. Hermione slowly pulled away, leaving Draco cold. He watched her back as she stretched her arms upward and tossed her head back. Her unruly hair fell in tangled curls down to the dip at the base of her spine. Was he unwell, or was her hair very sexy? 

He folded his arms behind his back as she stood, still very comfortably post-coital. She had a lovely bum. He’d have to pay more attention to it if they ever shagged again. He knew chances were slim, but held onto a bit of hope. If it had been as good for her as it had been for him, she’d be back. 

She was tidying herself up and pulling on clothing. “Rise and shine, Draco,” she chirped, glancing at him over her shoulder. He was every inch a Greek statue, comfortably reposed and almost aggravatingly attractive with his hair mussed and dipping over his eyes. He sighed and stood, stretching and pulling on his clothing. 

“Alright, Granger,” he said, throwing both their bags over his shoulder. “Dijon, was it?”


	11. Chapter 11

They checked out of the motel and walked toward the station. It wasn’t far. Draco was walking with a spring in his step Hermione hadn’t seen before. She wasn’t sure what to do. Sex with Draco Malfoy was unlike any sex she had ever had before, both in intensity and payoff. He was simultaneously extremely gentle and extremely demanding, and it worked for her. On the other hand, she had just slept with somebody while on a job, and that person was Draco Malfoy, so it was unideal. 

Hermione checked the map on her phone and glanced upward, her neck prickling as they turned onto a new street. “Draco,” she murmured, reaching out to grab his arm. “Draco, stop.” 

A man had stepped in front of them about ten feet ahead. Hermione put her hand on the pocket where she kept her wand and began to back away, turning whence they had come. There was someone there, too. Well, she wasn’t a talented warrior for nothing. Not even bothering with her wand she began to focus her energy on the man who had appeared behind them. Suddenly, a painfully loud crack split the air. She jumped, focus lost. Draco collapsed beside her, howling in pain and clutching his leg. He was bleeding profusely. Hermione spun around again. 

A gun? 

She barely had time to feel shocked before everything went black. 

Hermione woke up in stages. First she heard two men, not far from her, discussing Draco. They each had a different accent, but they spoke in English. Next, it occurred to her that she was sitting upright. She tried to move, but found herself restrained. She was tied to a chair. She tried to gather her strength, searching for the energy to curse them, but she couldn’t. She slumped. Finally, she slowly opened her eyes, blinking the sleep out of them. 

She was in a large room, brightly lit by a glass conservatory ceiling. Two men leaned against a large wooden desk, upon which sheets of parchment were carefully stacked. The walls were adorned with delicate sconces and paintings which featured fields of flowers. Lavender, sunflowers, and tiger lillies sprang forth against the dark red wall upon which they hung. One wall had been overtaken by a bookshelf which was full and neatly organized. Another, smaller bookcase with a glass door sat propped against another wall, lined with books which looked quite a bit older than the others. Somewhere not far from her, a clock struck six. She had been passed out for four hours. 

Draco was sat across from her, also tied to a chair. His eyes were closed and his head had dropped to his shoulder. A white bandage was wrapped around his thigh where the bullet must have struck him. Hermione bit back her panic. A small amount of blood had soaked through it, but not much. They must have cleaned him up. She had seen worse and she knew recovery when she saw it. He would be fine. Her torso hurt immensely as she breathed. 

The speaking had stopped, and two men were watching her curiously. These were not the men who had confronted them earlier. The shorter of the two men had twinkling eyes, deep laugh lines around his eyes, and a salt and pepper beard. He was short and just a bit stout, but his broad shoulders hinted at a muscular frame which had perhaps not been put to use in recent years. “Signorina Granger!” he exclaimed in a thick Italian accent. “I’m so happy to see you awake.” He straightened his suit, a stylish grey number with light pinstripes. “My colleague and I were wondering when you would join us.” Hermione pegged him to be in his late fifties. 

The man next to him was slight and tall, almost too thin. He wore thick-rimmed glasses and a simple white shirt with grey trousers. His face was pleasant but guarded and neutral. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows and his fingertips were stained with ink. His dark hair was messy, as if he had been outside on a windy day, and his tanned skin was stretched taut over a delicate bone structure. He was perhaps forty. 

Hermione coughed, and the slight man tapped a wand. A glass of water flew to her side. “It isn’t poisoned,” he assured her. His accent hinted at a French upbringing. “We don’t want to hurt you.” The glass tapped insistently against Hermione’s cheek, but she turned away. The man shrugged and the glass returned to the table, where he himself took a deep drink. “Suit yourself.” 

“We apologize for your stomach,” the Italian man said. “We’ve patched you up, of course. It was a through-and-through. It should heal nicely.” Hermione stared at them. “Would you care for dinner?”

Hermione cleared her throat. “I would like to know with whom I’m dining, first.” 

The Italian man laughed heartily. “Oh good, yes, I had heard you wouldn’t take this sort of thing lying down. Your reputation precedes you, Signorina Granger.” He was easily the happiest captor she had ever had. “I am, of course, Giacomo Ridolfino. And my colleague here goes by the name of Le Bib.” 

“Enchanté,” the slight man said, bowing his head briefly.  _ Enchanted to meet you _ . 

Hermione nodded at him. “Charmed, I’m sure.” She wiggled against her restraints. 

“Ah, yes,” Ridolfino said, “you may find that you don’t have your usual energy right now. We had to give you a little something to weaken you, you see.” Hermione’s eyes hardened. “We have absolutely no intention of harming you, quite the opposite, but you recall what you did to my friend at the gas station outside of Mâcon. We have taken your wand, of course, but there were other precautions to consider.” 

The half-giant. “I wondered who his employer was. To whom did the others belong?”

Le Bib cleared his throat. “They were mine. You are an impressive witch, Mademoiselle Granger.” She raised her chin. “Unfortunately, you are currently directing your formidable and manifold talents toward the protection of someone with whom Monsieur Ridolfino and I both take issue.”

They all looked at Draco, each of them exasperated with him for their own reasons.

“What have you done to him?” she asked. 

“Nothing,” Mr. Ridolfino said. “Truly, nothing. We shot him, of course. He passed out and hasn’t woken up since. His leg will be fine, we saw to that.”

“You used a gun,” Hermione said, the image of the man on the street pointing it at her becoming clearer. 

“Yes, I find them so useful. Most wizards have no idea what they even are, you know.” Ridolfino straightened his jacket again. “I have had the opportunity to collaborate with a muggle gentleman who operates an enterprise similar to mine, you see, and he alerted me to their many uses.” 

  
“The mafia,” Hermione said, almost to herself. 

Ridolfino clapped. “But of course you know of the mafia, Signorina Granger! You are a fount of wisdom and knowledge.” Never before in her life had Hermione had such complimentary jailers. “Now, to dinner. I am famished.”

Hermione found herself floating down a lavishly decorated hallway, still tied to the same chair upon which she had awoken. Renaissance and Baroque artwork covered every available wallspace, and house elves in brocaded tea cozies hurried ahead of her. Massive chandeliers hung every few feet, and she ducked her head to avoid colliding with them. Her captors walked behind her, heads tilted in urgent conversation.

At long last, Hermione’s chair turned into a large dining room and settled to the left of the head of the table. The room was two stories high, and the entire wall opposite her was devoted to a fresco depicting the punishment of Prometheus. She couldn’t imagine a less appetizing view for a meal. The long table, which could easily have sat thirty people, was set for three. Steam was escaping from tureens set at each place, and an army of silverware extended outward from each plate. A delicate glass at each seat had been filled with deep red wine. Platters of richly prepared meats and vegetables were spread across the table, and the smell of fresh butter hung heavy in the air.

“It is a reminder,” Le Bib told her, sitting at the head of the table and following her gaze to the fresco. “Betrayal will be punished. Now, I beg your forgiveness for the paltry provisions. This is merely my summer home, and I am operating here with a reduced staff.” Hermione glanced at her restraints and back at him. He smiled. “But of course.” With a wave of his wand, the ropes holding Hermione in place were rearranged. Her torso and legs remained tied to the chair, but her arms were now free. Clapping at the sight of the magnificent feast, Ridolfino took his seat to Le Bib’s right. 

“Mangiamo!” Ridolfino announced.  _ Let’s eat! _ He removed the lid from his tureen and piled his plate with meat.

Le Bib could guess her thoughts. “There is no point in trying to escape,” he informed her. “The tonic we gave you was of my own invention. You will not be strong enough to break those knots.” 

Hermione sat completely still, warily eyeing the food. She hadn’t eaten since the evening before, but she wasn’t foolish enough to try anything with which they presented her. She had starved before and lived. She could do it again now. Her vision went blurry at the thoughts of starvation and she bit down on her tongue, the coppery taste of blood violently pulling her into the present. 

Le Bib reached toward her and she jumped. His eyes pierced hers for a moment before he picked up her glass and raised it to her in a toast. “A token of good faith,” he said, and took a deep sip of her wine. Hermione watched the glass as he placed it back in front of her. 

Hermione’s lip quirked in irritation. Had this been a British criminal, she would already be dead. There was none of this pretence with her own countrymen, and she had always appreciated their directness. She picked up her glass and drank deeply. 

“We have been watching your progress with Signor Malfoy with great interest, Signorina Granger,” Ridolfino informed her. “We are impressed. You swatted LeComte down as if he were a fly buzzing about your soup. You obliviated my friend’s—” he gestured to Le Bib “—hit witch so thoroughly that she requires medical attention to regain her memory, Lord help her. And my giant, my undefeated giant, is a trembling mess on the floor after meeting you. He tells me you did not even have a wand.”

Le Bib opened his tureen and carefully ate a spoonful of his soup. “Mademoiselle Granger, fighting is an art, is it not?” he asked. 

“Some say so.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say it is a skill, certainly.”

Le Bib smiled, as if laughing at a punchline she hadn’t heard. “An art or a skill, either way, it is the same thing, no?” Hermione didn’t respond. “If it is a skill, it is a skill you have mastered, Mademoiselle Granger.” He ran his eyes down her body appreciatively. “To perform such magic with no words and no wand. You must know you are remarkable.” He removed the lid from her tureen. “Please, eat. You must be ravenous.”

Hermione took a tiny sip of soup, still not convinced she wouldn’t be poisoned. 

“It is safe,” Le Bib said quietly. “I have no wish to harm you.”

“Why not? What am I to you?”

It was Ridolfino who reacted, dabbing his mouth with a thick serviette. “Signorina Granger, I have been learning about you from some friends of mine in your country. I had heard of you before, of course; that nasty business with Signor Riddle.” He and Le Bib shook their heads, as if the war had been a minor dispute between two groups of unruly children rather than one of the most violent conflicts in wizarding history. “But since then, you have not done so much. You sold some books and now do some investigations. It is not appropriate for a witch of your calibre.” 

“Ah, but what is?” Le Bib asked, stretching back in his chair like a cat. “What could be challenging enough for a witch like our Mademoiselle Granger?” He smiled at her. She glanced between them both and tried her restraints. “Ah, ah, ah, Mademoiselle Granger. I have already told you it is futile.” Le Bib smiled indulgently, as if she were a naughty child. 

“What do you want from me?”

The two men exchanged a glance. “It is not what we want from you, Mademoiselle Granger. It is what we can do for you.”

“And what, pray tell, can you do for me?”

Le Bib leaned toward her, his hands dancing on the table and his eyes betraying a newfound intensity. “I can offer you all the excitement you could possibly imagine, Mademoiselle Granger.”

From down the hall, Hermione heard Draco begin to shout


	12. Chapter 12

Le Bib’s carefully polite face flashed with rage and he snarled in dissatisfaction. “Amenez-le ici,” he barked at an elf. He suddenly looked like the dangerous criminal she knew him to be.  _ Bring him here.  _ He turned back to Hermione, schooling his features back to refined pleasantness. “It seems we are to be interrupted, my dear Mademoiselle Granger.”

Hermione sipped her wine. “What excitement can you offer me?”

A smile spread slowly across Le Bib’s face. “Employment, Mademoiselle Granger. Your life in London offers you nothing but tedium and dissatisfaction. Come work for me. You will see the world as you have never seen it before.” 

“You want to… to hire me?” 

“Just imagine it. Travelling the world. Meeting all kinds of people. The adventures you shall have.” He paused to refill Ridolfino’s glass. “You are such a sharply honed weapon, Mademoiselle Granger. Your skills are wasted in London.” Hermione rolled her eyes. “Consider the possibilities,” Le Bib said, his low voice almost a whisper. “Imagine how powerful you could be if you weren’t held back.” Hermione’s breath caught in her throat. A life without limitations. They stared at one another in silence.

The spell was broken by Draco’s arrival. He stumbled into the dining room, trembling as he tripped over his injured leg. A house elf walked meekly beside him, steering him to a seat. 

“Pas là. À côté de Monsieur Ridolfino,” Le Bib barked.  _ Not there. Next to Mister Ridolfino _ . The elf steered Draco to the seat to Ridolfino’s right, Draco’s eyes on the fresco as they moved. 

“Charming painting,” he sneered. “Nothing like torture to whet the appetite.” He sat unceremoniously in the chair proffered him by the elf.

Le Bib watched him, betraying no emotion. “I am pleased you could join us, Monsieur Malfoy. I am sorry to see that you are in pain. Please, eat.” Draco scoffed. Another tureen appeared in front of him. “It is quite safe, I assure you. I do not wish to harm you at this time.”

Draco removed the lid from the tureen and took a delicate sip of the soup. “And why not? If I recall correctly, I owe you quite a debt, and my friend here has incapacitated at least a few of your employees.” He glanced at Hermione, who appeared in good health. Her eyes flicked across his face.

“I do not begrudge Mademoiselle Granger her power,” Le Bib said. “Indeed, I am grateful for the opportunity to have seen her work.” 

Draco rolled his eyes. Continental criminals were always theatrical like this. They could never just get to the point.

“I wish to discuss your debt, Monsieur Malfoy.” Le Bib studied Draco’s face as it paled. “It occurs to me that there is perhaps a way this debt could be forgiven with no inconvenience to you at all, financial or otherwise.”

Draco was immediately suspicious. “And how could we arrange this?”

Le Bib smiled broadly. “Well, that is entirely up to Mademoiselle Granger here. I do not presume to speak for the lady.” 

Draco had no idea what this meant, but he was troubled by what he saw when he locked eyes with Hermione. She observed him carefully before turning to look at Le Bib. She looked cautious but intrigued. 

“I hear you were once a bookseller, Monsieur Le Bib,” Hermione said, her voice as loud and clear as a bell in the cavernous dining room. Draco admired her both her gumption and her interest in biography, he really did, but he was a touch worried either would get her killed right now. 

“Indeed I was, Mademoiselle Granger. I enjoyed my work, however, I found that my ambitions could not be contained to a bookshop. I believe you once felt the same.” 

Whatever was happening, whatever this conversation was about, Draco didn’t like it. Hermione was nodding slowly. “Is it true you began your career trading in stolen books?” she asked. 

“Your sources are excellent, Mademoiselle Granger,” Le Bib responded, impressed. “They could be of good use to you; perhaps in a different line of work.” Ridolfino laughed quietly.

“I think I could get along with the kind of criminal who traded in rare and beautiful books,” she said. “I don’t know that my tolerance for crime extends much beyond that.” 

Le Bib refilled her glass of wine. Ridolfino was concentrating on a well-marbled steak. Draco was concentrating on Hermione. 

Le Bib watched her with interest. “I do not know that men ever change very much. I am as I ever was, certainly. I have always had a weakness for beauty.” 

Hermione turned to look at Draco, and her breath caught when she saw the fear and confusion in his eyes. She tore her eyes from his face and turned back to Le Bib. “And him?” 

“Well, everything would be forgotten, bien sûr.”  _ Of course _ . 

“And Signor Ridolfino?” The Italian man perked up. 

“Hm? Oh, yes, of course. Of course you want to know, Signorina Granger!” He appeared delighted by her concern. “Your interest speaks to your fabled loyalty. Signor Malfoy wounded my pride, you understand.” 

“I was under the impression he stole a very valuable necklace from you.”

Ridolfino shrugged. “Yes, but this is no problem. A colleague of mine in Algiers came across a gentleman who had stolen that same necklace from our Signor Malfoy. That gentleman is no longer a concern, and the necklace has been returned to my precious wife.” 

Hermione swallowed. “So if not the necklace, what do you want?” 

“Satisfaction, Signorina Granger.”

“Will he live?”

Ridolfino spread his hands wide. “Naturalmente.”  _ Naturally _ . 

“Forgive me if I don’t believe that valuing the lives of thieves comes naturally to you,” Hermione said quietly. 

Ridolfino laughed. It boomed and echoed. “You are quick, Signorina! But I give you my word, he will be safe, if not sound.” Draco swallowed. “My cat is dead because of him, after all.” 

Hermione laughed without any humour. “Are these deals interdependent?” she asked, turning back to Le Bib. 

“Monsieur Ridolfino and I are friends, but we are our own men,” he assured her. “Let Giacomo have his fun with our Monsieur Malfoy and that debt will be repaid, no matter your answer to me.” 

“What if I say no?” Hermione asked. Draco’s eyes were panicked. He understood he was about to have a very unpleasant evening and he wasn’t thrilled about it, but he was more concerned about Le Bib’s unrevealed proposition to Hermione. 

“Well, I will have my amends one way or another.” 

“If he can’t pay?”

Le Bib smirked. “Oh, Mademoiselle Granger, I think we both know he cannot. Perhaps a friend will show him some kindness.” 

“If they won’t?”

“I learned this trade from men who still understood what it was to be a man of honour in this field, a man of dignity. I am not so concerned with money. Payment comes in many forms, and a life is as good a currency as any.” 

Draco coughed. Hermione turned to look at him, her face expressionless again. The battle mask. 

“Are you a man of honour and dignity, Monsieur Malfoy?” Le Bib asked him, taking a sip of his wine. 

“I have plans to be,” Draco answered, still staring at Hermione. She tilted her head toward Le Bib, but kept her eyes on Draco’s. 

“I’ll need some time,” she told Le Bib. “To decide.” 

“But of course,” Ridolfino said graciously. “My colleague will see you to a room where you can rest for the evening, and we have of course had the contents of your bag laundered. Now, Signor Malfoy, I believe we are due a little chat.”


	13. Chapter 13

As a small child, years before she had ever heard of Hogwarts, Hemione had had a bullying problem. She had been a scrawny slip of a child, with hair as tall as her head and a nose forever buried in a book twice her weight. She was a prime subject for pushing around. 

Various grownups had tried to help her with this issue. There had been meetings with parents, meetings with the school, meetings with the bullies in question. The result was only ever sneakier bullies. They were considering switching her to a different school, or even trying to arrange for a private tutor. She could only take the abuse for so long. 

It had been a P.E. teacher who had actually been able to help the young Hermione. “Hermione, there will always be people who want to punish you for your differences,” the teacher had told her. “Get your game face on.” 

It was a mantra which would stick with her throughout her life. Right before she punched Malfoy as a thirteen year old, get your game face on. As she stole a dragon from Gringotts at seventeen, get your game face on. As she stepped onto battlefield after battlefield, wand at the ready and making peace with her maker, get your game face on. Harry called it the “warrior look,” and Ron had called it her “battle face.” They were both wrong. It was her game face, and she had perfected it as a small child, knees dirty, palms bloody, and books scattered after being pushed to the ground. Expressionless, defiant, strong. 

She was watching Draco Malfoy across a table, condemning him to an evening of torture. She was weaker than she had ever been, magically incapacitated. She had no wand. For the first time, she had no plan for escape. Draco was staring intently at her, as if by staring deeply at her for long enough he would find some sort of comfort. Get your game face on, Hermione. 

Le Bib glanced from Hermione’s stony expression to Draco’s pleading one, and pushed back his chair. “Mademoiselle Granger, if you will allow me I will show you to your room. Monsieur Malfoy, you have an appointment with my colleague.” He snapped, and her restraints disappeared.

Hermione did not look at Draco again as she pushed her chair back and slowly rose. Le Bib offered her his arm and she took it. He was taller than she had realized. She fought the impulse to look back toward Draco as Le Bib swept them from the dining room with an aristocratic ease. 

Le Bib guided her through a veritable labyrinth of hallways and rooms, each one more sumptuously decorated than the last. “You say this is your summer home?” she asked lightly. 

He chuckled deeply. “Yes. You are welcome to use it any time, should you accept my offer. Call it an employee benefit.” They walked in silence until they reached an imposing oak door. “Your room, Mademoiselle Granger. If there is anything else I can offer you, do not hesitate. I am your humble servant.” 

“May I have my wand back?”

Le Bib smiled. “I am sure you understand that I cannot accommodate that particular request at this time.” There was a spark in his eyes, a delight in their verbal dance.

Hermione watched him levelly. “I had to ask.”

“Of course.” He opened the door and stepped back, gesturing for Hermione to enter. “Good evening, Mademoiselle Granger.” He closed the door and she heard him retreat down the hallway, and Hermione found herself quite alone. 

Never before had any of her captors treated her so kindly, nor had they ever provided her with such luxurious accommodations. The room was tall and deep, with midnight-blue wallpaper embossed with gold fleur-de-lys stretching from floor to ceiling. A plush burgundy carpet stretched over dark hardwood floors. An antique wardrobe stood opposite a four-poster bed which was draped with heavy blankets, the kind which looked so thick she might drown in them. Her rucksack was leaned against the wardrobe, and her clean clothing was folded on a chair next to the bed. On the wall opposite the door a large bay window dominated, overlooking pristine gardens. A door next to the wardrobe led into a lavish bathroom. Hermione sat on the bed, relishing the feeling as the blankets gave beneath her. She could sleep well in this bed, she knew. From the mirror on the wardrobe door she stared at herself. Get your game face on. 

This was the most dangerous part of being captured. It would be so easy to think she was alone, to remove this mask and let herself be vulnerable. Hermione could feel despair in the pit of her stomach and knew that if she let them tears would pour out of her. It would be so nice to forget that she was captive in an unknown manor and to pretend that her captor was not watching her somewhere, somehow, as she knew he was. There was not a chance he would truly leave her alone as long as she was here unwillingly. For once she had a captor who did not underestimate her, and she was bested. Deep below the anger and fear, Hermione was impressed. Finally, a challenge. She hadn’t had one in so long. 

Imagine how powerful you could be if you weren’t held back.

Le Bib’s words floated uninvited through her thoughts. She didn’t want to admit that they had some appeal. Hermione had always been the best at almost everything she did. The problem with being the best, of course, is that it leaves nobody to beat. Her only competition was herself, and it had been a long time since she had outdone herself. 

Imagine how powerful you could be if you weren’t held back. 

How powerful could she be? She stared at her hands, concentrating as a small spark shot out of her right index finger. She had accomplished things with magic of which few people could even dream. She, who had joined this world at such a disadvantage, who had been so discriminated against for so long. Hagrid had once called her the smartest witch of her age, but what if she could be more than that? What if, instead of holding her back with his potions, Le Bib pushed her to achieve greater and greater heights? 

Imagine how powerful you could be if you weren’t held back. 

If there was one thing people misunderstood about Hermione Granger, it was that she wasn’t a stickler for the rules at all. She didn’t think she had followed a single rule since she was eleven and she had met Harry. In fact, her criminal record was longer than Draco Malfoy’s, considering the life she had led prior to and during the war. The fact that they were crimes done in defense of humanity only made her more comfortable with the idea that the law was malleable, and certainly not an indicator of morality. She was guided by logic and principles, but not by rules.

Could she have excitement again? It wasn’t the life she had imagined for herself, of course, but nothing about her life had been to plan. She had been raised by dentists in the suburbs. She wasn’t supposed to be the kind of person who felt a fire in her belly at the prospect of running headlong into mortal danger. 

Darkness had fallen. Hermione stood in front of the wardrobe mirror and slowly peeled off her clothes and stared at herself by the light of the moon which filtered through the window. She supposed she was pretty in this light, prettier than during the day. The moonlight caught her scars and they shone silver, intersecting like a constellation across her body. She didn’t mind her scars like this. Each one told a story of a time she had survived. She had survived so many times. Hermione crossed her arms across herself, holding her waist. She didn’t care if Le Bib were watching this. Nakedness was not the same as vulnerability. 

Somewhere in this manor, palace, whatever it was, Draco was being tortured. She felt sick at that idea. She had been meant to escort him to London, not to get them captured. This was perhaps the worst professional failure of her life. Still, he must have been tortured before, her nightmare notwithstanding. Nobody made it through that war without living through the kind of pain which would have had them welcoming death. She had to believe that he would be able to handle whatever Ridolfino was doing to him, and that he would understand that even though she couldn’t save him from this, she could save him in a way that really mattered. 

Hermione sighed, and twisted to see her back. Her scars twinkled, a collection of reminders carved into her skin that she could take just about anything. She stroked her hip, fitting her fingers onto the bruised finger marks which had formed there. Had it really only been this morning that she and Draco had crossed every boundary she would never have predicted them crossing together? 

It had felt something like Le Bib’s offer. Scary and exciting; a terrible idea, but in such nice wrapping. They had collapsed together so beautifully. 

Hermione pulled on some clean clothes, breathing in deeply the scent of fresh cotton. She gazed wistfully at the bed, but knew she could not sleep. The circumstances demanded a watchful, wakeful night. She sat down at the end of the bed, and swallowed as she stared at herself. There she sat, staring until she no longer saw herself, until pink and orange streaked across the sky outside her window. The pushy sun took the gentle moon’s place, and the constellations on her skin were replaced with angry pink lines which joined up like jagged stained glass. 

Hermione stood, gently stretching. Her joints cracked and strained. Her damaged arm protested just a touch more than the rest of her body, but Hermione was pleased to realize that it had healed very significantly. She shoved the remainder of her clothing into her rucksack, and slung it over her back. 

The door creaked blasphemously in the serene and silent hallway. A small house elf appeared at Hermione’s side as she stepped into the hallway and closed it. The elf gestured for her to follow, and she did. 

“Est-ce qu’il est gentil?” she asked.  _ Is he nice? _ The elf did not respond, and Hermione made no more efforts at conversation as the elf guided her to a brightly lit sitting room. Le Bib stood as she entered, setting aside a newspaper. Ridolfino reclined in a chair opposite him. A large breakfast was spread across an ornate credenza to the side of the entrance. 

“Mademoiselle Granger,” Le Bib said, his voice soft in the early morning light. “I trust you slept well.” Hermione made no move to answer him, but made her way toward a small couch not far from where he had been sitting. “Where are my manners? Please, sit.” Hermione sank slowly down. “Now, Mademoiselle Granger, I hope you have an answer for me.”

Hermione nodded, stubbornness making her push her chin up and stare him directly in the eyes. Le Bib pursed his lips, but his eyes sparkled with entertainment. This was all a pretense, and they both knew that. What choice did she have? What choice did Hermione Granger ever have?

“I have conditions,” she said, her voice cracking open the still morning air. 

Le Bib smiled and leaned back in his chair, crossing his leg over one knee and studying her intensely. “I am prepared to negotiate.” 


	14. Chapter 14

This was the second worst pain Draco had ever felt. The first had been during the war, prior to Voldemort’s death, when he had failed rather spectacularly at a task which had been assigned to him. That hadn’t been his best birthday. 

Draco groaned. That Ridolfino was talented, he gave him that. He was a very nuanced torturer. It had almost been artistic. He hadn’t done anything which would leave any permanent damage, either, for which Draco was grateful. He supposed that had been a favour to Hermione, part of the negotiation Draco had witnessed at the table the night before. There was certainly no reason Ridolfino would have felt compelled to kindness on Draco’s behalf. 

Draco felt a sting, and then some of the pain abated. Another sting, more relief. He heard someone murmuring next to him, and tried to open his eyes. 

“Oh, let me get that.” Hermione. She murmured again, and the swelling around his eyes went down. He could have cried at the sight of her. 

He found himself in a large, plush bed in a vast red-walled room. Light poured in from the window, making him wince. “Watching me sleep again, Granger?”

She smiled in a way he couldn’t describe. He saw a touch of something like concern in her eyes before her face became controlled and expressionless again. “Looked like you could use some healing,” she said lightly, as if he hadn’t been tortured for hours the night before. Her ability to speak so freely and casually about the horrors humans inflict on one another was disarming. 

He nodded stiffly, and she cast a healing charm at his neck. “Thanks.” He sat up, rubbing his shoulder and evaluating her. She looked exhausted and wary, but a distant happiness was playing in that smile. “You let him take me.” 

“I had no choice. I’m so sorry.” 

She sounded anguished, and it occurred to Draco that there were two Hermione Grangers. There was the Granger who hated him and accompanied her best mates in their charge to make his life a living nightmare, and there was the Granger who was so doggedly loyal that she was willing to go to any length to help him. He liked Granger liking him, or at least being in his corner. She had never been on his side before. He wasn’t entirely sure that she liked him at all, of course. That sex, though. She had definitely liked the sex. He ran his gaze over her body appreciatively, and she narrowed her eyes as if she knew his thoughts. 

“Some mess I’ve got us into,” Draco said by way of apology. Hermione shrugged, absentmindedly twirling her wand. “You have your wand,” he said suddenly, jumping up. A muscle in his leg protested at the reminder of an injury from the night before, and he stumbled. 

“I do. You’re going home.”

“Are you coming?”

“It’s my job to deliver you to the Ministry.” It had been one of her stipulations, a professional courtesy. Let her finish this job. Le Bib had been very gracious throughout the negotiation process.

Draco laughed easily, as if he weren't covered in bruises. “Merlin, Granger. I hope I never have your work ethic.” She smiled emptily and watched in silence as he packed his things. He couldn’t wait to return to London and pay taxes.

Hermione waited in silence until Draco was finished. “Clin,” she said, glancing upward. With a crack, a house elf appeared. “Clin, pouvez-vous nous accompagner jusqu’à la porte?”  _ Clin, could you accompany us to the door? _ The elf bowed deeply and led them from the room, down a thickly carpeted hallway. Every few paces they passed an ornate statue or bust. 

Draco shook his head. “Leave it to you to be so polite to a house elf,” he laughed. The sound broke off, as if he had cut off his laughter mid-exhale. “Granger, how is it that you know the elf’s name?” She hurried ahead of him. She must have spent more time with Le Bib than Draco realised for her to have become friendly with his elves. He wasn’t thrilled at that idea.

By the time they made it to the front door, Draco was very concerned. It wasn’t that he knew Hermione very well, but he knew her well enough to know that she was lying in her silence. When they exited the manor, Le Bib was standing next to a sleek black car. His face cracked into a wide and calculated smile and he nodded his head at Hermione in greeting. 

“Monsieur Malfoy, I hope you slept well, all things considered,” he said, his soft voice carrying on the breeze. Draco shrugged, resenting the Frenchman’s unrelenting eloquence.

Hermione walked forward and threw her rucksack into the back of the car before standing to face Le Bib. “Thank you for this,” she gestured to the car. “It’s very helpful.” 

“I could arrange a portkey, you know,” the tall French man said. The conversation between them was easy and almost familiar. Draco felt like he had missed a step. Hermione certainly hadn’t been this comfortable with Le Bib the evening prior. 

“I prefer it this way.” She held his gaze with an intensity Draco recognized. He wished desperately to know what was happening. Maybe he could stop it. 

Le Bib nodded and turned to Draco. “Monsieur Malfoy, my driver will see you and Mademoiselle Granger to la Gare Mâcon.” Draco turned to Hermione for some sign of what to do, and she nodded. He made his way to the car and climbed in. The seats inside were deep and wide, and the interior of the car smelled of buttery leather. From inside, he could hear Le Bib and Hermione speaking low. “Mademoiselle Granger,” Le Bib finally said, pulling her hand to his lips, “until next time.”

Still holding Hermione’s hand, Le Bib helped her into the car and closed the door behind her. Draco heard him rapping on the roof of the car and it set into motion. Hermione avoided his eyes. 

“Hermione, what was that?”

She said nothing, her eyes flicking to the driver, scolding Draco into silence with a glare. Draco collapsed into his seat. As they drove Draco would periodically glance at Hermione, but she was staring through the windows, miles away. He longed to know where she escaped when she was allowed to just be. What did happiness look like to Hermione Granger? They passed by the motel where they had spent the previous morning together, and Draco bit back a sigh at the memory of Hermione on top of him, her head thrown back in abandon. 

When they arrived at the train station the driver opened the door, helping Hermione out. She smiled at him gratefully and offered him a few galleons, which he refused. “Monsieur Le Bib would not have it,” he said in a thick accent. Draco scrambled out behind her. “I will see you soon,” he heard the driver say. 

At long last, they were on the train from Mâcon to Dijon. “What are the chances we make it back to London without interruption now?” Draco asked her, cutting off some thought. 

“Very good, actually.” She frowned thoughtfully. “We should be back this evening. I’ll escort you to the Ministry, of course.” 

“So, what? I’m no longer in debt to Le Bib? He’s just going to leave me alone?”

“That’s about the sum of it, yes.” 

“He’s forgiven this debt out of the kindness of his heart, has he?”

“Something like that.” 

Draco swallowed. He just wanted to know what she had done. Surely she hadn’t slept with the man. Or rather, even if she had, surely he wasn’t willing to write off that much money in exchange for getting laid. Not that he didn’t think sex with Hermione wasn’t worth every galleon, because it definitely was. He couldn’t shake the image of Le Bib’s lips on Hermione’s hand, or his unbearably self-satisfied musings on beauty the evening before. 

Was Hermione beautiful? It seemed insufficient for her. Mountains were beautiful. Fields of wildflowers were beautiful. She was larger than life, like a black hole around which everything danced and into which everything disappeared. She moved through the world and left it inescapably altered. She sighed and he tried to memorize the sound of it, unable to shake a creeping sense of finality. 

What had this stupidly principled witch done to protect him? 

Hermione gazed out the window, vaguely aware that Draco was staring at her. She didn’t care. He wasn’t running, she was sure of that, and neither Le Bib nor Ridolfino would be pursuing them. Her conditions had been simple. She would finish this job. She wanted to take the long way back to London, the muggle way, even though Le Bib could have supplied her with more convenient transportation. She had enjoyed this disaster of a job, all things considered. Was it so wrong to stretch it out for a few more hours? She had agreed to help Le Bib find things and people, but not to harm anyone unless absolutely necessary. “You will not kill?” Le Bib had asked her, his eyebrows moving just barely in surprise. “I would have thought that it would be second nature to you by now.” 

Hermione had smiled as if he had told a particularly clever joke. “I’m not a soldier anymore,” she had said. He assured her that this would be no problem. She would be useful to him in manifold ways, whether or not she was willing to kill. 

“Hermione,” Draco said, his voice low and worried. “Hermione, what’s going to happen?”

She turned to him, and smiled in a way which she knew couldn’t be convincing. “Nothing I didn’t sign up for.” 

It was the worst thing she could have said. 

The remainder of the trip passed without incident, as Hermione had promised. Draco had hoped for some sort of catastrophe until the very last second, some indication that whatever agreement Hermione had with Le Bib was not going to hold. London was dark when they arrived, and the lights of the city stretched out before them. They walked without direction, slowly making their way to and along the Thames. 

“I think I can safely say this has been the most interesting job of my investigative career,” Hermione told him, breaking the silence which had divided them for so many hours. 

Draco nodded distractedly. “Hermione, whatever you did in France, whatever you agreed to, you can get out of it.”

Hermione laughed. “Who says I want to?” He stared at her just a bit too intensely. She blushed and looked away. “Anyway, even I can’t go back on an Unbreakable Vow. My talents only extend so far.” Draco’s blood froze. 

That had been one of Le Bib’s conditions. 

The silence stretched out for miles between them. Draco barely allowed himself to breathe lest it break the spell of the moment. They both stared into the water, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the other.

“What now?” Draco finally asked, his quiet voice barely audible over the gentle lapping of the water. 

Hermione smiled at him. “Well, now I take you to the Ministry.”

“Is there any chance I’ll be seeing you again? Yesterday you said we were something like friends, after all.” 

Hermione stared into the dirty water of the Thames. Had that been only yesterday? A strangled laugh escaped her, more dispairing than humourous. Draco fought the urge to pull her to him and wondered whether or not she would ever lead a life which didn’t involve sacrificing herself to save someone undeserving. 

“I stand by that,” she said. “I’d be happy to get a drink with you sometime.” Draco stared at her, not daring to hope. “I just have a job to do, first.”

When they arrived at the Ministry, Hermione held him by the arm and led him in. She steered him to the Ministry of Magic’s Revenue Agency. 

“Hermione Granger for James Shacklebolt,” she announced, and a large door swung open. 

A young wizard sat behind a desk, spectacles pushed atop his head. He jumped up when he saw them. “Hermione! Brilliant. Excellent work as always. Your fee will be in your account tomorrow.”

“Thank you, James. How’s your father?”

The wizard laughed. “Not enjoying retirement. Not as fun as the war, I don’t think.” Hermione smirked and Draco tried to hold back a short laugh. “Thank you for bringing him in.”

Hermione released Draco and his arm felt too cold. “No problem. Thanks for coming in so late, I’m sorry about the hour.” The wizard shrugged. Hermione nodded toward Draco, not breaking eye contact with James. “Don’t let this one give you too much trouble. He’s tricky.” 

She glanced just briefly at Draco, and he saw excitement and uncertainty warring in her eyes. He watched her as she turned quickly and walked away, his eyes on her retreating figure until she turned out of sight. 


	15. Chapter 15

When Draco was released from Azkaban for the second time, this time after serving only two months for tax evasion, he received the good news that his reparations had been paid. The Ministry had seized the manor and had apparently decided he literally did not have enough left after that to give. He was poor but free. 

He took a small flat above a bookshop not far from Diagon Alley and tried to create a life. He found a job as a bookkeeper for a local restaurant, and began to think that perhaps his sins were fading into the rearview mirror. He did what he could to make his home cozy, though it wasn’t the word anybody would use to describe him or his tastes. He kept a comfortable chair in his bedroom, placed just so. If one were to sit in it one could comfortably stare at the bed for hours. He filled every available space with bookcases and nearly cleared out the stock of the bookstore below him. He wasn’t much of a reader himself, but just in case someone who did like to read ever stopped by to visit.

He had hoped that she would come. His release had been publicized in a small article, which he thought she might have seen. Still, she never materialized. He so wanted to take her up on that drink she had suggested. After three months, he couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t bravery so much as desperation that propelled him onto a cold November street one Thursday night, tugging on his coat as he went.

The walk to her store was about a half hour, and he barely felt the wind as it whipped against his face on the way there. He turned onto the street off of a street off of Diagon Alley where he knew she had established her operation, his heart threatening to burst through his chest. There it was; H. G. Investigations. The lights were out. The windows were covered with brown packing paper. A small sign was pinned inside the door in a neat hand he recognized from his school days. “Closed indefinitely.” 

He looked around wildly, as if she would appear out of another doorway at any moment. He half expected her to laugh at him for falling for it. The minutes passed by as he stood there, wind reddening his cheeks, staring at the dark store in front of him, waiting for the earth to swallow him whole or for her to emerge. Neither happened.

Draco tried to continue living his life after that, but the space left in her absence was a constant distraction. Where was she? What if she were hurt? What if she were dead, because he lost a stupid poker game and she offered herself as some twisted bail? Could he ever forgive himself again? Would it be disrespectful to her sacrifice if he just killed himself? 

His nightmares took a new turn. The only body he ever saw now was hers, perfect and scarred, eyes staring emptily ahead of her. Every night she died in a different way. He didn’t much like sleeping.

The days turned into weeks and months, and Draco continued to do well in his work despite his obsession with Hermione’s disappearance. He took daily walks to her shop, each time just a touch more hope being extinguished from his breast. He had an almost unhealthy obsession with buying books he would never read, his flat becoming overrun with texts and tomes. He sent her regular owls and they returned his messages to him unread. He sat in his chair at night, watching the bed and remembering with fondness the day when she accidentally cursed him. 

It nearly drove him to madness not knowing what she had done. She had done it for him, certainly. Debts like his didn’t simply disappear overnight without someone having struck a deal of monumental proportions. It felt like a benediction he could never hope to deserve.

Four months after he had first visited Hermione’s shop, Draco sent an owl to Harry Potter, whom he had learned was teaching at Hogwarts. In a long, rambling letter he explained that Hermione had helped him out of a tight spot, and he hadn’t heard from her, and he was just wondering if Harry would pass along the best address at which to reach her. Harry’s response was short, but more than Draco could have hoped for. “She’s fine.” It almost gave him a heart attack. Hope dared to bloom in his chest and he held that parchment to himself like it was something holy. He pinned it to his wall.

The months dragged on, and Draco excelled in his work. Soon he was managing the restaurant, and then opening his own. He was no chef, but he was a shrewd businessman. He moved into a more comfortable flat, and half of his boxes were untouched books. Some nights he still stayed up, staring at the empty bed, desperately hoping that in sleeplessness he would be somehow closer to Hermione. Wherever she was, was she awake? Was she watching a man she barely knew as he slept? Was she making love to him? 

Two years had passed. Draco had just opened another restaurant. This time, the cuisine was French. He had called it Mâconnais, and couldn’t explain to anyone why he had decided to name it after a singularly unremarkable French city. It was another quirk of his, like his book hoarding, his daily walks on which nobody was allowed to accompany him, and his adamant refusal to play any card games. At thirty-four he was an unusual but no longer unwelcome member of society. He wished she could know him like this, as an eccentric restaurateur rather than a pariah. 

It was a poorly kept secret that Draco Malfoy was obsessed and possibly in love with a disappeared Hermione Granger. He could be seen most days staring at her shop, which was clue enough. At first people couldn’t believe that he could be in love with a muggleborn witch, and it had even come as a shock to himself, but old prejudices seem trifling when you’re in love with a supernova. 

The opening of Mâconnais had gone extremely well, and Draco anticipated good reviews in the Daily Prophet the next day. He had hired a promising chef from Marseille to run his kitchen, and having such a rising star in charge of things was sure to generate some interest from the public. The opening was likely still ongoing. He didn’t want to imagine how much wine was being poured out for free that night. The witch he had hired to manage the restaurant was generous to a fault, but her interpersonal skills were above reproach. She compensated for his own gruffness with the staff.

His feet were travelling a well-known path, just as they did every night. He didn’t even have to think about this route anymore. It was almost comforting. As the years had passed, the weeds had grown in front of Hermione’s shop. The paper in the windows had yellowed and curled. The windows had accumulated a thick layer of dust. Sometimes he traced the note she had left inside the door, cutting a path through the grime on the glass with his finger. It was proof that she had been there, once. Whatever it was she had done for him, this was the least he could do for her. As the rest of her world marched on without her, he would remember her every day until his last.

Draco stopped in front of her shop where he always did. Her neighbours had long since stopped finding it noteworthy to see him standing there, sometimes for hours, staring at an empty storefront. He had become part of the furniture. 

His eyes grew wide as he looked up, and his heart slammed against his chest. The brown packing paper was missing from the windows. He swallowed and stared. There were no other visible changes or signs of life. He remained rooted to that spot into the early hours of the morning.

The next day Draco couldn’t concentrate at work. No number of positive reviews could get his attention. His manager and chef eventually stopped trying, leaving him to sit at his desk in the back of the restaurant, absently tapping a quill against a sheaf of parchment and sketching out a complicated network of lines. If he hadn’t been so meticulously concentrated on them, they would have assumed they were errant doodles. 

As soon as it got dark, Draco almost sprinted from the restaurant. He tripped and stumbled as he rushed to her shop, and was gasping for air by the time he stopped in front of it. There was a light on in the flat above it. It was everything he could do not to knock. 

He made himself stay away for a whole week, an exercise in masochism. It was the first week in two years that he didn’t walk to Hermione’s shop every day, which her neighbours found as gossip-worthy as his initial pilgrimages. The restaurant needed his attention, of course. There were always little fires to put out over the first few days after an opening, both metaphorical and otherwise. It was a very convenient excuse not to be there. He stayed up almost every night watching his bed. 

Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. It was lunchtime on Friday, his manager had the restaurant under control, and he told her he had to leave for the rest of the day. He didn’t even wait to hear her response. 

He practically sprinted to Hermione’s shop, leaving him coughing and sputtering when he finally arrived at her street. The windows had been cleaned and the weeds removed. The small sign announcing its closure was gone, replaced by a different sign written in the same neat hand. “Open.” A light glowed inside. 

He didn’t know for how long he stared at the shop, but the sky went pink above him and then darkened. The sign inside the door had been switched to one which read “Closed.” He heard the tinkling of a bell as the door to the shop opened and Hermione appeared. She pulled a key from her pocket and turned it in the lock. 

Draco’s breath left him all at once. He felt like he might collapse. 

“Hermione,” he said, quietly, not trusting his voice to hold. She turned on her heel, pulling out her wand, acting on those same instincts he remembered. Neither knew how long they stared at one another. 

It was she who moved first, of course. She was braver than him. She approached him slowly, as if not fully believing that he was there. “Hello, Draco,” she said, her voice unsteady. She reached a hand out as if to touch his arm.

He wanted to hug her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to ask her where the hell she had been. He wanted to make sure she was okay. He wanted to ask her if she’d thought of him at all. He wanted to know what she had done. He wanted to tell her he was so, so sorry. He wanted to tell her how angry he was at her for leaving. He wanted to let her know that he had about one thousand books which she could borrow, if she’d like, and a really comfy chair on which to read them if she felt like staying for a bit. 

He turned on his heel and ran, leaving her with her hand suspended in the air. 

The next day, Draco woke up and took extra time with his appearance. He desperately needed his armour today. The walk to her shop felt like the walk to the gallows. He wondered if he should stop and get flowers, or was that too presumptuous? He didn’t want to show up empty-handed. He didn’t know what she expected of him. What made him think she wanted anything from him at all? She had been gone for two years. What was it she had said, that she’d get a drink with him but had a job to do first? He had dissected those words in the years that she was gone, distilling every last drop of possible meaning from them. 

When he arrived at her street he stared again at her shop, full of signs of life. He forced himself to walk to the door, forced himself to put his hand on the doorknob, forced himself to turn it and push the door open. A bell chimed gently, announcing his arrival, and it was too late to turn back. Hermione appeared in a doorway on the opposite side of the room, looking as he remembered in jeans and a t-shirt. 

“Draco,” she said, clearly surprised. She looked around, as if suddenly unsure in her surroundings. “I’m still getting settled in.”

  
  
He wiped his palms, suddenly sweaty, on his clothes. “I—I shouldn’t have come.” 

“No, you should have,” she said. “I’m glad you did. Come in.” She picked a stack of parchment up off of a chair in front of her desk and set it on the ground, gesturing to the seat. He sat awkwardly, unsure what was supposed to happen now. He hadn’t planned beyond this. Her hair was piled messily in a bun atop her head, and his fingers flexed involuntarily at the memory of his fist tangled in it. 

Her shop was small and cluttered, with books crammed into every available space and precarious stacks of parchment teetering on every flat surface. A small ladder was propped against a tall bookshelf. Her large desk dominated the space, and a cat was curled on the plush but worn chair behind it. She had tossed a coat over the back of the chair. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, practical and without pretense. Draco stared at it and swallowed.

“So how can I help you, Draco?” Hermione asked, smiling gently. “Got a case for me?”


	16. Chapter 16

Leaving London to pursue adventure had been an easy decision, but that didn’t quite translate into Hermione being happy with having made it. Le Bib had kept her busy with a whirlwind of exploits, just as he had promised. She even found time to visit family and friends on the odd weekend. She just couldn’t bring herself to return to her little shop, where she had first heard of her mission to return Draco Malfoy to London and where this improbable series of events had first begun. 

After leaving Draco at the Ministry she had slept for two days before informing her landlady that she would be leaving her apartment and shop for a period of time but would continue to pay rent for it. The older witch hadn’t much cared either way, and agreed to keep an eye on the place in Hermione’s absence. Then she had packed a bag, left her cat in the care of her neighbour, and made her way back to France. 

Those who knew her were of course worried when Hermione told them she was moving to the continent for a mysterious contract, the details of which she kept extremely vague. She couldn’t imagine what they thought she was doing, though she was sure they would never guess the truth. Eventually they stopped asking questions, for which she was grateful. 

Le Bib was an interesting employer. They had what could be best described as a pleasantly professional relationship. She spent her days jetsetting across the world and devising increasingly clever ways to steal jewels, and in her spare time was able to take advantage of some of the loveliest beaches in the world on Le Bib’s dime. She was able to add both “getting an even tan” and “safe breaking” to her catalogue of skills. She had never provided any services to Le Bib that nobody else could have, but she understood that he found amusement in employing the famed Hermione Granger and putting her to work as a thief. 

He certainly held up his end of the deal, giving her increasingly complex missions with increasingly high stakes. She took immense pleasure in pushing the limits of her abilities, both intellectual and magical. In one particularly inspired heist, she had managed to steal an entire manor house and all its contents. It might have bothered her, if she had ever really thought about it, that she was now officially a criminal. There was less glory in these crimes than in those of her past, when her criminality manifested in the toppling of a fascist government. In her contract with Le Bib, her activities were more of the art theft variety. True to her word she had never killed anyone for him, but there had been the odd moment of desperate violence. 

It wasn’t the most fulfilling life, but it brought excitement in spades. She kept up with the events of the British wizarding world via missives from those she had left behind and her Daily Prophet subscription. She had read that Draco had been arrested and then released, and then in a letter Ginny Potter had mentioned him opening a restaurant, of all things. 

She hoped he was well. Her task of returning him to London was the first indication she had had since the war ended that there could be something truly challenging for her in England. Still, she had to leave. Not just because she had entered into an Unbreakable Vow with Le Bib, which she had, but also because she couldn’t help but feel that if she were to cultivate that subtle alchemy she had felt with Draco in Mâcon she might want to end her desperate pursuit of her next great challenge or her next great accomplishment. She wasn’t ready to be still.

When she had arrived back in France Le Bib had offered her accommodation at his summer home in Mâcon while she wasn’t on a job for him. She opted to stay in the room where she had stayed the evening prior to agreeing to Le Bib’s terms, but some mornings would find her curled up and asleep in a chair in the room where Draco had woken. On those mornings the memory of his smile when he had opened his eyes and seen her would cause a crash in her stomach. It was not unlike when the first hex was cast in a battle, or when she returned triumphant from a job. 

Some evenings Le Bib would eat dinner with her, and they would exchange polite conversation. She preferred to know as little as possible about his other activities and he didn’t care to know much about her personal life, so they would exchange quick and light observations about politics and the weather. He never asked her about Draco Malfoy, but he knew from his house elves that sometimes the Malfoy man sent her letters which she returned unopened. 

It wasn’t that Hermione didn’t want to know what was in those letters. She was simply scared to read them, to know what he thought of her and what he needed her to know. It had been Schrödinger’s fling; so long as those letters remained unopened it both had and hadn’t been of monumental importance. She could live with uncertainty much easier than she could live with being sure of her own foolishness. 

Her landlady wrote to her with some regularity to update her on the state of her shop, and whether or not she had received any urgent mail. Some of these letters would touch on the local gossip, including the fact that Draco Malfoy had been keeping vigil at her closed shop every night. If it had been anyone else she would have interpreted this stalking as a sign of admiration expressed in an uncomfortable way. He had such a warped concept of manners and chivalry, however, that she didn’t want to presume to fathom his motives. 

She didn’t understand him at all. He had looked at her with such hope during that fateful dinner with Le Bib and Ridolfino, and then with such relief the next morning. Even as she handed him over to the government which would imprison him, she had felt his eyes on her, bright with promise. It had unsettled her and made her doubt her decision to leave, which was reason enough to expedite her departure. Her life had been simpler prior to that job. He had lived so peacefully in her memory as an arrogant and cruel child, the Other in her personal war on hatred. It didn’t sit well with her that that mission had complicated her notions of Draco Malfoy. Nuance suited him better than she liked to admit. 

Sometimes, as she walked through the streets of Mâcon, she would purposefully pass by the small hotel where they had spent two nights together. Sometimes she would doggedly avoid it. She had had the odd lover since, but none that had consumed her the way he had. Sometimes he visited her in her dreams and she would wake, panting and wide-eyed, before remembering where she was. 

One month to the day before her contract was to end, Le Bib had invited her to dinner with him at the manor where Hermione was living. They had met in the large dining room where their first negotiation had taken place, Hermione sat at his right. Happily, her back was turned on the fresco of Prometheus.

“Mademoiselle Granger,” he had said, waiting for her to sit, “I am so pleased you could join me.” They had never taken to using first names with one another. “I am of course here to discuss your contract. It is set to expire in a month.” He clapped, and a beautiful pasta dish appeared in front of her.

“Yes,” she had said lightly. “Are we here to negotiate?”

“I have always admired your ability to see my meaning before I even speak,” he told her. “Is there any way I could convince you to stay?”

“That depends on the offer,” Hermione had said, smiling and sampling her dinner. 

Le Bib examined her, leaning back and taking a sip of the wine which had appeared in their glasses. “Have you enjoyed your employ with me?”

“I have.”

“Have you wanted for adventure?”

“Not at all.”

“Have you wanted for compensation?”

That was a truly preposterous suggestion. Hermione knew she had lined his pockets quite nicely through all her heists, but her pay had been obscene. “No.” 

“Have you wanted for companionship?” 

Here, Hermione found her answer catching in her throat. Her mind turned to a letter she had received from Harry some months before, in which he mentioned that Draco Malfoy of all people had been asking after her. Harry had been very surprised to report this. Hermione had been less surprised to hear of it. Le Bib leaned forward again. 

“My sources inform me that you have some friends in Mâcon, and you have not been lonely. So you hesitate because of a particular individual in London?”

Hermione forced herself to look him in the eye, but said nothing. 

“I see. I hope Monsieur Malfoy is worth it, Mademoiselle Granger.”

The rest of the meal passed in silence, and it was with a combination of regret and relief that Hermione carried her suitcase from the house one month later.

Hermione found herself standing in her little shop. Every step she took disrupted the thick pile of dust which had coated everything in her absence, and the motes swirled in the dim light which was forcing its way through the brown packing paper she had put up prior to her departure two years earlier. She ripped it down and crumpled it on the floor, pleased to see light flooding the nooks and crannies she had so missed in her time away. 

That night she saw Draco for the first time since she had left. He was standing in front of her shop as she peeked through the curtain of the dark flat she occupied just above it. He seemed startled, and she did her best to keep up as emotions flickered across his face. 

He looked tired, as if he weren’t sleeping well. She wondered if nightmares still plagued him the way they had two years earlier. He wore dark clothing which made his pale face glow in contrast, moon-like, against the bricks behind him. He ran his hand through his hair, and Hermione felt her mouth go dry. He stayed there for hours.

The next time she saw him she had been leaving the shop after a long day of cleaning up when she heard his voice. It was barely there, just a whisper on the wind, but it was his. It was all she could do not to sprint to him, but as soon as she got near, he was gone. She almost wondered if it had been a hallucination. 

Hermione was in the back room of her shop, trying to find a file which she was sure was somewhere, when the bell on the front door announced someone’s arrival. She sprung up, accidentally knocking over a pile of parchment, before rushing out to greet her guest.

As soon as he saw her, Draco’s eyes clouded with uncertainty and regret. She stared at him a second before swallowing and finding the courage to speak. 

“Draco,” she said, glancing around and wishing she had done a better job of cleaning up. “I’m still getting settled in.”   
  
The regret radiating off of his tense form was palpable. “I—I shouldn’t have come.” 

“No, you should have,” she said. “I’m glad you did. Come in.” She moved a large stack of parchment off a seat and gestured to it, desperately willing her breath to calm. She schooled her expression into gentle friendliness. “So how can I help you, Draco?” she asked. “Got a case for me?”


	17. Chapter 17

He laughed once and ran his hand through his hair before remembering that he had just styled it. “Well, until recently I had a missing person case with which I could have used some help, but that cleared itself up.” 

Hermione laughed. “Love it when cases solve themselves.” 

“Where did you go?” His voice was plaintive, almost pleading. 

“Everywhere, or just about. My contract with Le Bib was international in scope.” 

Two years of working for one of the world’s great criminals because Draco had lost a bet. Anger and shame were battling it out in his chest. He stood very suddenly and she watched him as he walked, agitated, to her bookshelf and began examining the books there. Words tripped out of him as if forced. “Did you find it?” 

She cocked her head at him. “Find what?”

“Whatever you were looking for.”

She smiled sadly. “No.” 

Draco nodded and turned back to her. “Does that mean you’re leaving again?”

Her eyes were inscrutable. “No.”

He tried to hide his flush of happiness. His legs felt numb. He slumped against the bookshelf and stared wildly around the shop, desperate for something with which to anchor himself. He settled for staring at the lightbulb again. “Why did you do it, Hermione?” 

She released a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. “Well, he would have killed you otherwise, of course, and he promised me something I didn’t think life here could offer me.”

Draco swallowed. He was scared of this, of what Le Bib could offer Hermione that he couldn’t. “Like what?”

“Adventure. Excitement. The chance to test myself and see just how much I could do. No limitations.” She tilted her head to the side. “The pay wasn’t bad, either.” 

“Do you still think that… that London doesn’t have those things for you? Does it have too many limitations?” Draco asked. 

“I don’t know. I know I wanted to come back after my contract ended.” 

Draco tried to crush the bubble of hope which was forming in the pit of his stomach. He reminded himself that wanting to come back and wanting to come back to him were two very different things. There was no reason for her to have thought of him as much as he had thought of her over the past two years. 

“You never answered my owls.”

She grimaced at the ground. “I didn’t know if I wanted to know what you wrote.” Her voice was smaller than he had ever heard it. 

Well, that wasn’t promising. “Did you and Le Bib ever…”

Hermione laughed. “Lord, no. Purely professional. He just flirts with everything that walks. Very continental.” Draco seemed to find that less funny than she did. She studied his face for a moment. “Would that have bothered you?”

He had no right to be bothered either way, and he knew it, so he shrugged. Hermione nodded as if she understood him perfectly. He feared she might.

“I realized I had to come back when I received a letter from my landlady wherein she mentioned, in passing, a blond gentleman who had made a habit of staring at my closed shop every night for two years. That, and I heard from Harry that certain people had been asking after me.” 

So she was back because of him. Well, she was back because her landlady thought he was some kind of stalker and because Potter had apparently let on about his letter. Draco gritted his teeth but softened as soon as he looked at her. She appeared to be in good health. She didn’t have those dark circles she had once had, the ones he knew he had in spades. It dazzled him to have her right there in front of him. She was propped against the messy desk as if her presence wasn’t blinding. 

“Any new scars?” he asked. 

“None, thank goodness. I think I have enough for one lifetime, don’t you?” He nodded and swallowed. How many times had he sketched out the patterns which zigged and zagged across her skin, remembering the feeling of them under his hands? They were like a complicated map he was desperate to travel, a particularly hopeless variety of wanderlust. There was a rush in his chest as he learned that they hadn’t changed. 

There was one question left. It was his turn to show some courage, but damn him if he wasn’t half ready to bolt instead. He was becoming very well-acquainted with the lightbulb. 

“Did you ever think of me?”

Hermione laughed softly, kindly, and he closed his eyes. “Of course, you muppet. You’re the reason I took that bloody contract to begin with.” He opened his eyes, expecting to find resentment in hers, but they were all warmth. 

“Of course,” he said, “that makes sense. I’m sorry.” 

“I’m not. It was a pretty good two years. But it was time to come home.” 

“Even though you didn’t find whatever it was?”

Hermione slowly stood, and Draco shifted. She was watching him intently, slowly approaching him where he was being held up by the bookcase. “It’s more that I realized I had accidentally left it here.” 

Draco couldn’t breathe. There was no way she meant what he desperately hoped she meant, but then there she was, standing in front of him and gently tilting his face to hers. He leapt up, almost knocking her over, and slammed his lips against hers. He felt her smiling against him and held back a shudder of pleasure, delighted to learn that she was real and this conversation had indeed happened. He steered her back toward her desk and lifted her onto it, fitting himself between her legs and trying to explain through this kiss everything he had wanted to say for two years. 

Hermione pulled away, gasping with laughter and want in equal measure. “I take it you’re glad I’m back, then.”

Draco simply pulled her back to him in response. 

Ten months later, Draco was walking the familiar path from Mâconnais to Hermione’s shop. He had a container of coq au vin in one hand and a book in the other. Hermione had been aghast at how many books he had collected in her absence, and he was now transferring them from his flat to hers, one book at a time. Of course, if he had his way they would have the same flat. He had made the argument to her that it would be much easier for him to give her all of these books if they simply lived together. She had protested that she could never leave the flat above her office, because it made it so convenient to work at all hours. He found her inability to maintain a normal human sleep schedule charming.

“Draco!” Her voice sent a rush through him as it always did, cutting short his thoughts. Hermione was hurrying to him from across the street. She pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I thought I’d come visit you at work.” 

He raised the bag. “I got a take-away. I was coming to you.” She smiled and took his hand. 

“Excellent. I’m starving.” They walked in happy silence for a few paces. 

“You know,” he said conversationally, “Mâconnais is doing very well. I’m starting to think of what my next challenge could be.” 

“Oh really?” 

“I noticed that the building next to yours is for sale. I thought maybe your neighbourhood could do with a nice cafe.” 

Hermione held back a knowing smirk. “Absolutely. The nearest one is a bit of a walk.” 

“And if I buy the building, I’ll own the flat above the cafe.”

Hermione feigned mild surprise. ”I suppose that’s true.” 

He smirked and continued in his affected nonchalance. “It occurred to me that if I were to do that, we might be able to move into the flat above it. It’s very big, lots of room for books. It’s right next to your shop.” He glanced at her and she was smiling. 

“When do you think you’ll be opening this cafe?”

“Well, the actual preparation would take about a year, but the first step is buying the property.” 

“And when would that happen?”

“Tomorrow at noon, unless you have any objections.” 

She laughed and shook her head, opening the door to her shop. The sign on the door swung with the motion, clattering slightly against the pane of glass. “Accepting exciting cases only.”

Draco followed her in as the familiar bell announced their arrival. “Of course you already have it all arranged. Food on the desk, you scoundrel,” she told him. Draco smirked as he arranged the food on the large desk that dominated Hermione’s shop, and she bit back a smile. She had indeed found it. 

  
  



End file.
